Computer Science Seminar: Nicholas Alexander Tomlin

Description

Nicholas Alexander Tomlin, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, will give a talk titled "Reasoning with Language Models" for the Department of Computer Science.

Abstract:

Language models are primarily trained via imitation on massive amounts of human data; as a result, they're capable of performing a wide range of tasks, but often lack the deep reasoning capabilities of classic AI systems like Deep Blue and AlphaGo. In this talk, Nicholas Tomlin will first present core technical challenges related to "reasoning with language," using his work on computer crossword solvers as a running example. Then, he will show how methods for "interactive reasoning" can enable human-AI teams to solve complex problems jointly. Finally, he will discuss his work on "explainable reasoning," where the goal is to explain the decisions made by expert AI systems like AlphaGo in human-interpretable terms. Tomlin will conclude by sharing his views on the future of language model reasoning, agents, and interactive systems.