International audience

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is a rapidly growing field aiming at creating collaborative systems where humans and intelligent machines cooperate in mixed teams towards shared goals. A clear characterization of the tasks and knowledge exchanged by the agents in HI applications is still missing, hampering both standardization and reuse when designing new HI systems. Knowledge Engineering (KE) methods have been used to solve such issue through the formalization of tasks and roles in knowledge-intensive processes. We investigate whether KE methods can be applied to HI scenarios, and specifically whether common, reusable elements such as knowledge roles, tasks and subtasks can be identified in contexts where symbolic, subsymbolic and human-in-the-loop components are involved. We first adapt the well-known CommonKADS methodology to HI, and then use it to analyze several HI projects and identify common tasks. The results are (i) a high-level ontology of HI knowledge roles, (ii) a set of novel, HI-specific tasks and (iii) an open repository to store scenarios1 – allowing reuse, validation and design of existing and new HI applications.

Abstract The unification of statistical (data-driven) and symbolic (knowledge-driven) methods is widely recognized as one of the key challenges of modern AI. Recent years have seen a large number of publications on such hybrid neuro-symbolic AI systems. That rapidly growing literature is highly diverse, mostly empirical, and is lacking a unifying view of the large variety of these hybrid systems. In this paper, we analyze a large body of recent literature and we propose a set of modular design patterns for such hybrid, neuro-symbolic systems. We are able to describe the architecture of a very large number of hybrid systems by composing only a small set of elementary patterns as building blocks. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) a taxonomically organised vocabulary to describe both processes and data structures used in hybrid systems; 2) a set of 15+ design patterns for hybrid AI systems organized in a set of elementary patterns and a set of compositional patterns; 3) an application of these design patterns in two realistic use-cases for hybrid AI systems. Our patterns reveal similarities between systems that were not recognized until now. Finally, our design patterns extend and refine Kautz’s earlier attempt at categorizing neuro-symbolic architectures.