A Glimpse into Statistical Relational AI: The Power of Indistinguishability

Braun, Tanya

Abstract

Statistical relational artificial intelligence, StaRAI for short, focuses on combining reasoning in uncertain environments with reasoning about individuals and relations in those environments. An important concept in StaRAI is indistinguishability, where groups of individuals behave indistinguishably in relation to each other in an environment. This indistinguishability manifests itself in symmetries in a propositional model and can be encoded compactly using logical constructs in relational models. Lifted inference then exploits indistinguishability for efficiency gains. This article showcases how to encode indistinguishability in models using logical constructs and highlights various ways of using indistinguishability during probabilistic inference.