Papers › Neuro-Symbolic Forward Reasoning

Neuro-Symbolic Forward Reasoning

18 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.09383archive 2025-07-28

Hikaru Shindo, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting

Reasoning is an essential part of human intelligence and thus has been a long-standing goal in artificial intelligence research. With the recent success of deep learning, incorporating reasoning with deep learning systems, i.e., neuro-symbolic AI has become a major field of interest. We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Forward Reasoner (NSFR), a new approach for reasoning tasks taking advantage of differentiable forward-chaining using first-order logic. The key idea is to combine differentiable forward-chaining reasoning with object-centric (deep) learning. Differentiable forward-chaining reasoning computes logical entailments smoothly, i.e., it deduces new facts from given facts and rules in a differentiable manner. The object-centric learning approach factorizes raw inputs into representations in terms of objects. Thus, it allows us to provide a consistent framework to perform the forward-chaining inference from raw inputs. NSFR factorizes the raw inputs into the object-centric representations, converts them into probabilistic ground atoms, and finally performs differentiable forward-chaining inference using weighted rules for inference. Our comprehensive experimental evaluations on object-centric reasoning data sets, 2D Kandinsky patterns and 3D CLEVR-Hans, and a variety of tasks show the effectiveness and advantage of our approach.

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load_images_and_labels ml-research/nsfr/src/data_kandinsky.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · f4285fd962226132 · report
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valuation_to_string ml-research/nsfr/src/nsfr_utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · be588a24b1b9d8cb · report
letterbox ml-research/nsfr/src/data_kandinsky.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · db89ca1b27aced79 · report
load_image_clevr ml-research/nsfr/src/data_clevr.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 31cd0d76f84177bf · report
load_image_yolo ml-research/nsfr/src/data_kandinsky.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · b8300d8a62602ce8 · report
valuation_to_attr_string ml-research/nsfr/src/nsfr_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · c3b79d296ee7933e · report

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