Neuro-Symbolic Forward Reasoning

Hikaru Shindo, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting

Keywords: neuro-symbolic AI, differentiable logic, object-centric reasoning

Abstract: 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 Neuro-Symbolic Forward Reasoner (NS-FR), 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 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. This allows us to provide a consistent framework to perform the forward-chaining inference from raw inputs. NS-FR factorizes the raw inputs into the object-centric representations, then 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 variety of tasks show the effectiveness and advantage of our approach.

One-sentence Summary: This paper proposes a new neuro-symbolic framework to perform visual reasoning using differentiable first-order logic.

Community Implementations: [ 3 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2110.09383/code)