Towards Neuro-Symbolic AI for Assured and Trustworthy Human-Autonomy Teaming

Despite the tremendous impact and potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for civilian and military applications, it has reached an impasse as learning and reasoning work well for certain applications and it generally suffers from a number of challenges such as hidden biases and causality. Next, “symbolic” AI (not as efficient as “sub-symbolic” AI), offers transparency, explainability, verifiability and trustworthiness. To address these limitations, neuro-symbolic AI has been emerged as a new AI field that combines efficiency of “sub-symbolic” AI with the assurance and transparency of “symbolic” AI. Furthermore, AI (that suffers from aforementioned challenges) will remain inadequate for operating independently in contested, unpredictable and complex multi-domain battlefield (MDB) environment for the foreseeable future and the AI enabled autonomous systems will require human in the loop to complete the mission in such a contested environment. Moreover, in order to successfully integrate AI enabled autonomous systems into military operations, military operators need to have assurance that these systems will perform as expected and in a safe manner. Most importantly, Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) for shared learning and understanding and joint reasoning is crucial to assist operations across military domains (space, air, land, maritime, and cyber) at combat speed with high assurance and trust. In this paper, we present a rough guide to key research challenges and perspectives of neuro symbolic AI for assured and trustworthy HAT.