The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded its Advanced Grants for ground-breaking research. Three KU Leuven researchers are among this year's recipients: Luc De Raedt, Stefaan Poedts and Greet Van den Berghe.
ERC Advanced Grants are awarded to established researchers with a considerable academic track record. The grants are awarded for a five-year period and are usually worth up to €2.5 million.
Luc De Raedt: foundations for a new wave in AI
Full professor Faculty of Engineering Science; Department of Computer Science; manager of Leuven.AI
Neural networks that effortlessly generate texts, images, or videos. Various AI tools have quickly found their way to a broad audience. Behind the scenes, there is already talk of a new wave in AI that potentially possesses an even higher complexity: neurosymbolic AI (NeSy).
"Language models like ChatGPT are trained on vast sets of data, but they have no notion of logic or probability. As a result, the models are not reliable for all tasks," says computer scientist Luc De Raedt, director of Leuven.AI. "For example, ChatGPT can generate a coherent sequence of words and sentences, but it lacks the formal knowledge of subjects such as mathematics, physics, or chemistry to handle certain problems or topics correctly. The integration of symbolic reasoning with deep learning, that is the basis of neurosymbolic AI."
In the DeepLog project, Professor De Raedt wants to lay the foundations for such integration. "We will identify the building blocks for neurosymbolic AI: so-called primitives that combine the learning ability of neural networks with knowledge and probability-based reasoning techniques. Ultimately, we want to create a novel framework for enabling the development of NeSy systems and their applications."
