Embeddings as Probabilistic Equivalence in Logic Programs

Jaron Maene, Efthymia Tsamoura

Keywords: probabilistic programming, neurosymbolic AI, logic programming, knowledge graph embeddings, soft unification

TL;DR: We introduce a distribution semantics on logic programs using probabilistic equivalence.

Abstract: The integration of logic programs with embedding models resulted in a class of neurosymbolic frameworks that jointly learn symbolic rules and representations for the symbols in the logic (constant or predicate). The key idea that enabled this integration was the differentiable relaxation of unification, the algorithm for variable instantiation during inference in logic programs. Unlike unification, its relaxed counterpart exploits the similarity between symbols in the embedding space to decide when two symbols are semantically equivalent. We show that this similarity between symbols violates the transitive law of equivalence, leading to undesirable side effects in learning and inference. To alleviate those side effects, we are the first to revamp the well-known possible world semantics of probabilistic logic programs into new semantics called equivalence semantics. In our semantics, a probabilistic logic program induces a probability distribution over all possible equivalence relations between symbols, instead of a probability distribution over all possible subsets of probabilistic facts. We propose a factorization of the equivalence distribution using latent random variables and characterize its expressivity. Additionally, we propose both exact and approximate techniques for reasoning in our semantics. Experiments on well-known benchmarks show that the equivalence semantics leads to neurosymbolic models with up to 42% higher results than state-of-the-art baselines.

Primary Area: Probabilistic methods (e.g., variational inference, causal inference, Gaussian processes)

Submission Number: 9439