Miguel Couceiro

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Generalizing Analogical Inference from Boolean to Continuous Domains

• Francisco Cunha
• Yves Lepage
• Miguel Couceiro
• Zied Bouraoui

Analogical reasoning is a powerful inductive mechanism, widely used in human cognition and increasingly applied in artificial intelligence. Formal frameworks for analogical inference have been developed for Boolean domains, where inference is provably sound for affine functions and approximately correct for functions close to affine. These results have informed the design of analogy-based classifiers. However, they do not extend to regression tasks or continuous domains. In this paper, we revisit analogical inference from a foundational perspective. We first present a counterexample showing that existing generalization bounds fail even in the Boolean setting. We then introduce a unified framework for analogical reasoning in real-valued domains based on parameterized analogies defined via generalized means. This model subsumes both Boolean classification and regression, and supports analogical inference over continuous functions. We characterize the class of analogy-preserving functions in this setting and derive both worst-case and average-case error bounds under smoothness assumptions. Our results offer a general theory of analogical inference across discrete and continuous domains.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

EnergyCompress: A General Case Base Learning Strategy

• Fadi Badra
• Esteban Marquer
• Marie-Jeanne Lesot
• Miguel Couceiro
• David Leake

Case-based prediction (CBP) methods do not learn a model of the target decision function but instead perform an inference process that depends on two similarity measures and a reference case base. This paper proposes a strategy, called EnergyCompress, to learn an effective case base by selecting relevant cases from an initial set. Use of EnergyCompress decreases CBP inference time, through case base compression, and also increases prediction performance, for a wide variety of CBP algorithms. EnergyCompress relies on the proposition of a general formulation of the CBP task in the framework of energy-based models, which leads to a new and valuable characterization of the notion of competence in case-based reasoning, in particular at the source case level. Extensive experimental results on 18 benchmark datasets comparing EnergyCompress to 5 reference algorithms for case base maintenance support the benefit of the proposed strategy.

ECAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

KGPRUNE: A Web Application to Extract Subgraphs of Interest from Wikidata with Analogical Pruning

• Pierre Monnin
• Cherif-Hassan Nousradine
• Lucas Jarnac
• Laurel Zuckerman
• Miguel Couceiro

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have become ubiquitous publicly available knowledge sources, and are nowadays covering an ever increasing array of domains. However, not all knowledge represented is useful or pertaining when considering a new application or specific task. Also, due to their increasing size, handling large KGs in their entirety entails scalability issues. These two aspects asks for efficient methods to extract subgraphs of interest from existing KGs. To this aim, we introduce KGPrune, a Web Application that, given seed entities of interest and properties to traverse, extracts their neighboring subgraphs from Wikidata. To avoid topical drift, KGPrune relies on a frugal pruning algorithm based on analogical reasoning to only keep relevant neighbors while pruning irrelevant ones. The interest of KGPrune is illustrated by two concrete applications, namely, bootstrapping an enterprise KG and extracting knowledge related to looted artworks.

ECAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

REFINE-LM: Mitigating Language Model Stereotypes via Reinforcement Learning

• Rameez Qureshi
• Naïm Es-Sebbani
• Luis Galárraga
• Yvette Graham
• Miguel Couceiro
• Zied Bouraoui

With the introduction of (large) language models, there has been significant concern about the unintended bias such models may inherit from their training data. A number of studies have shown that such models propagate gender stereotypes, as well as geographical and racial bias, among other biases. While existing works tackle this issue by preprocessing data and debiasing embeddings, the proposed methods require a lot of computational resources and annotation effort while being limited to certain types of biases. To address these issues, we introduce REFINE-LM, a debiasing method that uses reinforcement learning to handle different types of biases without any fine-tuning. By training a simple model on top of the word probability distribution of a LM, our bias agnostic reinforcement learning method enables model debiasing without human annotations or significant computational resources. Experiments conducted on a wide range of models, including several LMs, show that our method (i) significantly reduces stereotypical biases while preserving LMs performance; (ii) is applicable to different types of biases, generalizing across contexts such as gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality-based biases; and (iii) it is not expensive to train.

TCS Journal 2020 Journal Article

On the efficiency of normal form systems for representing Boolean functions

• Miguel Couceiro
• Erkko Lehtonen
• Pierre Mercuriali
• Romain Péchoux

IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Behavior of Analogical Inference w. r. t. Boolean Functions

• Miguel Couceiro
• Nicolas Hug
• Henri Prade
• Gilles Richard

It has been observed that a particular form of analogical inference, based on analogical proportions, yields competitive results in classification tasks. Using the algebraic normal form of Boolean functions, it has been shown that analogical prediction is always exact iff the labeling function is affine. We point out that affine functions are also meaningful when using another view of analogy. We address the accuracy of analogical inference for arbitrary Boolean functions and show that if a function is epsilon-close to an affine function, then the probability of making a wrong prediction is upper bounded by 4 epsilon. This result is confirmed by an empirical study showing that the upper bound is tight. It highlights the specificity of analogical inference, also characterized in terms of the Hamming distance.

IJCAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Analogy-preserving functions: A way to extend Boolean samples

• Miguel Couceiro
• Nicolas Hug
• Henri Prade
• Gilles Richard

Training set extension is an important issue in machine learning. Indeed when the examples at hand are in a limited quantity, the performances of standard classifiers may significantly decrease and it can be helpful to build additional examples. In this paper, we consider the use of analogical reasoning, and more particularly of analogical proportions for extending training sets. Here the ground truth labels are considered to be given by a (partially known) function. We examine the conditions that are required for such functions to ensure an error-free extension in a Boolean setting. To this end, we introduce the notion of Analogy Preserving (AP) functions, and we prove that their class is the class of affine Boolean functions. This noteworthy theoretical result is complemented with an empirical investigation of approximate AP functions, which suggests that they remain suitable for training set extension.

ECAI Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Decision-making with Sugeno integrals: DMU vs. MCDM

• Miguel Couceiro
• Didier Dubois
• Henri Prade
• Tamás Waldhauser

This paper clarifies the connection between multiple criteria decision-making and decision under uncertainty in a qualitative setting relying on a finite value scale. While their mathematical formulations are very similar, the underlying assumptions differ and the latter problem turns out to be a special case of the former. Sugeno integrals are very general aggregation operations that can represent preference relations between uncertain acts or between multifactorial alternatives where attributes share the same totally ordered domain. This paper proposes a generalized form of the Sugeno integral that can cope with attributes which have distinct domains via the use of qualitative utility functions. In the case of decision under uncertainty, this model corresponds to state-dependent preferences on act consequences. Axiomatizations of the corresponding preference functionals are proposed in the cases where uncertainty is represented by possibility measures, by necessity measures, and by general monotonic set-functions, respectively. This is achieved by weakening previously proposed axiom systems for Sugeno integrals.

TCS Journal 2008 Journal Article

On a quasi-ordering on Boolean functions

• Miguel Couceiro
• Maurice Pouzet