Riccardo Andreoni, Andrei Buliga, Alessandro Daniele +4cs.AI
Neurosymbolic (NeSy) Artificial Intelligence aims to integrate Deep Learning (DL) architectures with symbolic reasoning. While initial NeSy approaches have targeted mainly symbolic reasoning in propositional and first-order logics, recent works have started to address the construction of neurosymbolic frameworks for Temporal Logics, and in particular for LTLf. These approaches have established temporal NeSy as a promising research direction, laying the foundations for learning under temporal constraints. Nonetheless, they leave many questions unanswered. From a theoretical perspective, several differentiable semantics for interpreting LTLf have been proposed but have not yet been formally and systematically defined within a unified framework. Moreover, existing approaches commonly rely on automata to represent temporal knowledge, resulting in limited scalability. Motivated by this research gap, this paper provides the following contributions: (i) formally defining different fuzzy semantics for LTLf, and systematically analysing theoretical properties regarding equivalences and dualities of temporal operators; (ii) showing how these semantics can be directly integrated within a novel NeSy framework, called DiffLTLf, enabling flexible and scalable learning without relying on the usage of automata; and (iii) introducing a novel evaluation protocol of increased complexity of learning tasks w.r.t. existing benchmarks. Our results show that the choice of fuzzy semantics has a significant impact on predictive performance. Moreover, DiffLTLf achieves performance on par with, and sometimes superior to, state-of-the-art probabilistic approaches while substantially improving scalability. Taken together, these results establish direct fuzzy interpretations as a competitive and scalable alternative to existing temporal NeSy frameworks.
Daniel Romero Schellhorn, Till Mossakowski, Björn Gehrkecs.AI cs.LG cs.LO math.CT math.LO math.PR
Neurosymbolic semantics is fragmented: classical, fuzzy, probabilistic and neural systems each define truth by their own inductive rules. NeSyCat, extending ULLER, subsumes them under a single inductive definition of truth, parametric in a strong monad and an aggregation structure on truth-values. NeSyCat has so far lacked an account of predicates and functions learned by neural networks. We provide NeSyCat Torch as the missing link and interpret computational symbols via neural networks, implementing the framework in probabilistic programming and tensor-based backends. We use the distribution monad for reference semantics and metric evaluation, and complement it by a monad for numerically stable, differentiable training: the lazy log-tensor monad over the log-semiring. For efficient training in batches, we furthermore employ a batch monad. The axioms are the source code: written once in monad-based do-notation, monadic bind performs marginalisation, lazily pruning unneeded branches. On MNIST addition, our HaskTorch, JAX, and PyTorch implementations outperform LTN and DeepProbLog in speed and accuracy, while achieving nearly the accuracy of DeepStochLog. However, unlike DeepStochLog, we stay in a uniform framework that applies to many first-order NeSy approaches. Namely, the construction is parametric in the monad; instantiating it with, e.g., the Giry monad extends the approach to continuous probability (working out a neural representation here is left for future work).
Neurosymbolic (NeSy) models integrate neural networks and symbolic reasoning for robust and interpretable AI. State-of-the-art NeSy models require that the symbolic component is expressed in a differentiable way, often complicating the use of approximate inference. We propose EM-NeSy which casts probabilistic NeSy learning as an instance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the expectation step, we compute the posterior over the neurally predicted symbols conditioned on the label via probabilistic inference. In the maximization step, we update the neural parameters based on this posterior using gradient descent only through the neural component. This formulation unlocks the full potential of the EM algorithm for NeSy learning. It allows NeSy to extend naturally to approximate reasoning without any additional modifications or differentiability requirements of the symbolic component. Furthermore, it recovers the standard end-to-end gradient-based NeSy setting under exact inference. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability and computational efficiency of EM-NeSy.