Knowledge-Guided AI Partner | Yaqi Xie | Neuro-Symbolic Wednesdays

💬 Discord: https://discord.gg/h8NVzwnysW 💻 GitHub: https://github.com/centaurinstitute 🤝 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/centaur-ai-institute/ 📢 New Initiative: Neuro-Symbolic Agentic Protocol ⭐ Star us on GitHub https://github.com/centaurinstitute/neuro-symbolic-agentic-protocol — 📘 This week, Yaqi Xie from Carnegie Mellon University presents building AI systems that can truly partner with humans requires more than scaling data and model size. They need to leverage structured knowledge, understand the world in context, and act in ways that align with human goals under real-world complexity. In this talk, I present a unified framework for building knowledge-guided AI partners, organized around three pillars: building knowledge into models, understanding the world, and collaborating with humans. I first show how symbolic knowledge can be embedded directly into neural architectures, integrating logical structure into representations rather than attaching reasoning as a post-hoc module. I then demonstrate how knowledge-guided models support reliable contextual perception, including robust scene understanding and hallucination mitigation. Finally, I present how these grounded representations enable proactive human–robot collaboration across various real-world scenarios, where robots interpret humans intent, anticipate actions, and coordinate behavior in dynamic environments. Together, these efforts outline a pathway toward capable, efficient, and trustworthy AI agents as genuine partners for humans, both digitally and physically. 🎓 Yaqi Xie is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Katia Sycara. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore, advised by Harold Soh. Her research focuses on human-AI synergy through neuro-symbolic fusion, bridging deep learning and symbolic reasoning to build trustworthy AI partners. Her long-term vision is to endow intelligent agents with knowledge-guided world models that evolve through continual interaction, allowing AI systems to reason, adapt, and collaborate as long-term partners alongside humans. — 🗨️ ​Join us for an interactive session exploring Neuro-Symbolic AI, the emerging paradigm that blends the strengths of neural networks with symbolic reasoning. We will discuss how hybrid approaches can enhance generalization, interpretability, and reasoning, and how these methods are shaping the future of intelligent systems. Whether you’re a researcher, engineer, or simply curious about the cutting edge of AI, you’ll find an engaging space to learn, connect, and exchange ideas. Event Format: 🔍 Reading Group 🎙️ Panel Discussion 🧩 Tutorials/Workshop Series 💬 Research Roundtable 🛠️ Open-Source Project Review 📄 Paper Pitch 🤝 Collaboration Hour 🍵 Networking Mixer #AI #NeuroSymbolic #FutureOfAI