Speaker: Parisa Kordjamshidi, Michigan State University
Talk Title: Spatial Intelligence: Neurosymbolic Modeling with Multiple Modalities
Date: Friday, March 27, 2026 - 1:30 - 2:30 PM EDT (North American Daylight Saving Time)
Abstract: Recent research shows that large language models (LLMs) often lack consistent reliability in tasks requiring complex reasoning, especially when a situated understanding of the physical world is involved. While they can produce fluent and well-structured text, they frequently fail at basic spatial reasoning skills such as understanding that left is the opposite of right, and struggle to ground such concepts in real-world contexts involving perception and action. In this talk, I will present our findings on how LLMs interpret spatial language and the challenges they face in reasoning and grounding it into visual modality. I will argue that symbolic representations can enhance neural models’ capacity for spatial and compositional reasoning by bridging linguistic structures with visual perception. Finally, I will introduce DomiKnowS, our generic neurosymbolic framework. DomiKnowS framework facilitates the seamless integration of symbolic logic and sub-symbolic representations to solve complex, AI-complete problems through various underlying algorithms.
Bio: Parisa Kordjamshidi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing, multimodal reasoning across vision and language, and neuro-symbolic learning. She received her Ph.D. from KU Leuven and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER, Amazon Faculty Research, and Fulbright Scholar Awards, and her research team received the NAACL-2025 Outstanding and EMNLP-2025 SAC paper awards. Dr. Kordjamshidi serves as Associate Editor of JAIR, Co-editor in Chief of ARR, Action Editor for TACL and has held roles in organization committee of major conferences including ACL, NAACL, EACL, EMNLP, ECML-PKDD, and AAAI. Recently, she was visiting associate professor at UCLA and currently is visiting professor at Bloomberg.
Zoom Access: Zoom Link and reach out to Hamed Zamani or Dan Parker for the passcode.
