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Safe Neurosymbolic Learning with Differentiable Symbolic Execution

15 Mar 2022NeurIPS Workshop AIPLANS 2021 12arXiv:2203.07671archive 2025-07-28

Chenxi Yang, Swarat Chaudhuri

We study the problem of learning worst-case-safe parameters for programs that use neural networks as well as symbolic, human-written code. Such neurosymbolic programs arise in many safety-critical domains. However, because they can use nondifferentiable operations, it is hard to learn their parameters using existing gradient-based approaches to safe learning. Our approach to this problem, Differentiable Symbolic Execution (DSE), samples control flow paths in a program, symbolically constructs worst-case "safety losses" along these paths, and backpropagates the gradients of these losses through program operations using a generalization of the REINFORCE estimator. We evaluate the method on a mix of synthetic tasks and real-world benchmarks. Our experiments show that DSE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art DiffAI method on these tasks.

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cxyang1997/dse officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
cxyang1997/smooth_synthesis_with_gradient_descent officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

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REINFORCE

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