Xiaotian Liu, Ali Pesaranghader, Hanze Li, Punyaphat Sukcharoenchaikul, Jaehong Kim, Tanmana Sadhu, Hyejeong Jeon, Scott Sanner. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Large language models (LLM) are being increasingly applied to tasks requiring commonsense reasoning. Despite their outstanding potential, the reasoning process of LLMs is prone to errors and hallucinations that hinder their applicability, especially in high-stakes scenarios. Several works have attempted to enhance commonsense reasoning performance of LLMs by (i) using prompting styles that elicit more accurate reasoning, (ii) utilizing the LLM as a semantic parser for a symbolic reasoner, or (iii) enforcing the LLM to simulate a logical inference rule. However, all these solutions have critical limitations: they are unable to leverage the internal commonsense knowledge of the LLM in tandem with an axiomatic knowledge base, they lack a mechanism to reliably repair erroneous inference steps, and their application is restricted to small knowledge bases that fit the context limit of the LLM. In this work, we present LLM-based Typed Hyperresolution (LLM-TH), a logical commonsense reasoning framework that leverages "theory resolution", a concept from classical logical inference which enables integrating LLMs into the "resolution" inference rule, thus mitigating reasoning errors and hallucinations and enabling verification of the reasoning procedure. LLM-TH is also equipped with a mechanism for repairing erroneous inference steps supported by theoretical guarantees. Using "Hyperresolution" and "Typed inference" schemes, we show that LLM-TH can efficiently reason over large knowledge bases consisting of tens of thousands of rules with arbitrary predicate arities. Our experiments on three diverse language-based reasoning tasks—preference reasoning, multi-domain deductive reasoning, and geographical question answering—showcase that LLM-TH, using merely a BART 406M parameter NLI entailment model, significantly reduces reasoning errors compared to baselines using Llama3-70B, Gemini1.5-Flash, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Mixtral-46.7B.

The ability to actively acquire information is essential for open-world planning under partial observability and incomplete knowledge. However, most existing embodied AI systems either assume a known object category or rely on passive perception strategies that exhaustively gather object and relational information from the environment. Such a strategy becomes insufficient in visually complex open-world settings. For instance, a typical household may contain thousands of novel and uniquely configured objects, most of which are irrelevant to the agent’s current task. Consequently, open-world agents must be capable of actively identifying and prioritizing task-relevant objects to enable efficient and goal-directed knowledge acquisition. In this work, we introduce ActiveVOO, a novel zero-shot framework for open-world embodied planning that emphasizes object-centric active knowledge acquisition. ActiveVOO employs lifted regression to generate compact, first-order subgoal descriptions that identify task-relevant objects, and provides a principled mechanism to quantify the utility of sensing actions based on commonsense priors derived from LLMs and VLMs. We evaluate ActiveVOO on the visual ALFWorld benchmark, where it achieves substantial improvements over existing LLM- and VLM-based planning approaches, notably outperforming VLMs fine-tuned on ALFWorld data. This work establishes a principled foundation for developing embodied agents capable of actively and efficiently acquiring knowledge to plan and act in open-world environments.

In order to safely operate sailboats, captains often rely on proper interpretation of several marine aspects to make decisions. In this project, we have developed an Augmented Reality System (ARS) to provide captains of sailboats with a centralized sensor data server and a visualization method. We have deployed an experimental proof-of-concept version of this system on our research vessel, SV Moon shadow. Assistance in navigation is of particular interest for small sailing vessels as they are sometimes sailed by the captain alone. At the same time there are a large number of data inputs such as wind, tide, weather, position, and presence of obstacles such as logs or kelp that have to be considered to choose the proper course of action. We introduce a visualization tool that provides an interface for representing a wide spectrum of relevant marine data. The interface relies on a real-time data server that provides information about the status of the vessel (wind, GPS, gyro, accelerometer, depth sounder etc.) An important component of the interface is a debris detector that analyzes data from a camera mounted on the bow in order to warn a captain about a potential collision. We have also examined initial feedback on this tool from a number of users.