Relational Neurosymbolic Markov Models

Sequential problems are ubiquitous in AI, such as in reinforcement learning or natural language processing. State-of-the-art deep sequential models, like transformers, excel in these settings but fail to guarantee the satisfaction of constraints necessary for trustworthy deployment. In contrast, neurosymbolic AI (NeSy) provides a sound formalism to enforce constraints in deep probabilistic models but scales exponentially on sequential problems. To overcome these limitations, we introduce relational neurosymbolic Markov models (NeSy-MMs), a new class of end-to-end differentiable sequential models that integrate and provably satisfy relational logical constraints. We propose a strategy for inference and learning that scales on sequential settings, and that combines approximate Bayesian inference, automated reasoning, and gradient estimation. Our experiments show that NeSy-MMs can solve problems beyond the current state-of-the-art in neurosymbolic AI and still provide strong guarantees with respect to desired properties. Moreover, we show that our models are more interpretable and that constraints can be adapted at test time to out-of-distribution scenarios.

NeSyA: Neurosymbolic Automata

Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (NeSy) has emerged as a promising direction to integrate low level perception with high level reasoning. Unfortunately, little attention has been given to developing NeSy systems tailored to temporal/sequential problems. This entails reasoning symbolically over sequences of subsymbolic observations towards a target prediction. We show that using a probabilistic semantics symbolic automata, which combine the power of automata for temporal structure specification with that of propositional logic, can be used to reason efficiently and differentiably over subsymbolic sequences. The proposed system, which we call NeSyA (Neuro Symbolic Automata), is shown to either scale or perform better than existing NeSy approaches when applied to problems with a temporal component.

EXPLAIN, AGREE, LEARN: Scaling Learning for Neural Probabilistic Logic

Neural probabilistic logic systems follow the neuro-symbolic (NeSy) paradigm by combining the perceptive and learning capabilities of neural networks with the robustness of probabilistic logic. Learning corresponds to likelihood optimization of the neural networks. However, to obtain the likelihood exactly, expensive probabilistic logic inference is required. To scale learning to more complex systems, we therefore propose to instead optimize a sampling based objective. We prove that the objective has a bounded error with respect to the likelihood, which vanishes when increasing the sample count. Furthermore, the error vanishes faster by exploiting a new concept of sample diversity. We then develop the EXPLAIN, AGREE, LEARN (EXAL) method that uses this objective. EXPLAIN samples explanations for the data. AGREE reweighs each explanation in concordance with the neural component. LEARN uses the reweighed explanations as a signal for learning. In contrast to previous NeSy methods, EXAL can scale to larger problem sizes while retaining theoretical guarantees on the error. Experimentally, our theoretical claims are verified and EXAL outperforms recent NeSy methods when scaling up the MNIST addition and Warcraft pathfinding problems.

Can Large Language Models Reason? A Characterization via 3-SAT

Large Language Models (LLMs) are said to possess advanced reasoning abilities. However, some skepticism exists as recent works show how LLMs often bypass true reasoning using shortcuts. Current methods for assessing the reasoning abilities of LLMs typically rely on open-source benchmarks that may be overrepresented in LLM training data, potentially skewing performance. We instead provide a computational theory perspective of reasoning, using 3-SAT -- the prototypical NP-complete problem that lies at the core of logical reasoning and constraint satisfaction tasks. By examining the phase transitions in 3-SAT, we empirically characterize the reasoning abilities of LLMs and show how they vary with the inherent hardness of the problems. Our experimental evidence shows that LLMs cannot perform true reasoning, as is required for solving 3-SAT problems.

On the Hardness of Probabilistic Neurosymbolic Learning

The limitations of purely neural learning have sparked an interest in probabilistic neurosymbolic models, which combine neural networks with probabilistic logical reasoning. As these neurosymbolic models are trained with gradient descent, we study the complexity of differentiating probabilistic reasoning. We prove that although approximating these gradients is intractable in general, it becomes tractable during training. Furthermore, we introduce WeightME, an unbiased gradient estimator based on model sampling. Under mild assumptions, WeightME approximates the gradient with probabilistic guarantees using a logarithmic number of calls to a SAT solver. Lastly, we evaluate the necessity of these guarantees on the gradient. Our experiments indicate that the existing biased approximations indeed struggle to optimize even when exact solving is still feasible.

CLEVR-POC: Reasoning-Intensive Visual Question Answering in Partially Observable Environments

The integration of learning and reasoning is high on the research agenda in AI. Nevertheless, there is only a little attention to use existing background knowledge for reasoning about partially observed scenes to answer questions about the scene. Yet, we as humans use such knowledge frequently to infer plausible answers to visual questions (by eliminating all inconsistent ones). Such knowledge often comes in the form of constraints about objects and it tends to be highly domain or environment-specific. We contribute a novel benchmark called CLEVR-POC for reasoning-intensive visual question answering (VQA) in partially observable environments under constraints. In CLEVR-POC, knowledge in the form of logical constraints needs to be leveraged to generate plausible answers to questions about a hidden object in a given partial scene. For instance, if one has the knowledge that all cups are colored either red, green or blue and that there is only one green cup, it becomes possible to deduce the color of an occluded cup as either red or blue, provided that all other cups, including the green one, are observed. Through experiments, we observe that the low performance of pre-trained vision language models like CLIP (~ 22%) and a large language model (LLM) like GPT-4 (~ 46%) on CLEVR-POC ascertains the necessity for frameworks that can handle reasoning-intensive tasks where environment-specific background knowledge is available and crucial. Furthermore, our demonstration illustrates that a neuro-symbolic model, which integrates an LLM like GPT-4 with a visual perception network and a formal logical reasoner, exhibits exceptional performance on CLEVR-POC.

Semirings for Probabilistic and Neuro-Symbolic Logic Programming

The field of probabilistic logic programming (PLP) focuses on integrating probabilistic models into programming languages based on logic. Over the past 30 years, numerous languages and frameworks have been developed for modeling, inference and learning in probabilistic logic programs. While originally PLP focused on discrete probability, more recent approaches have incorporated continuous distributions as well as neural networks, effectively yielding neural-symbolic methods. We provide a unified algebraic perspective on PLP, showing that many if not most of the extensions of PLP can be cast within a common algebraic logic programming framework, in which facts are labeled with elements of a semiring and disjunction and conjunction are replaced by addition and multiplication. This does not only hold for the PLP variations itself but also for the underlying execution mechanism that is based on (algebraic) model counting.

SayCanPay: Heuristic Planning with Large Language Models using Learnable Domain Knowledge

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive planning abilities due to their vast "world knowledge". Yet, obtaining plans that are both feasible (grounded in affordances) and cost-effective (in plan length), remains a challenge, despite recent progress. This contrasts with heuristic planning methods that employ domain knowledge (formalized in action models such as PDDL) and heuristic search to generate feasible, optimal plans. Inspired by this, we propose to combine the power of LLMs and heuristic planning by leveraging the world knowledge of LLMs and the principles of heuristic search. Our approach, SayCanPay, employs LLMs to generate actions (Say) guided by learnable domain knowledge, that evaluates actions' feasibility (Can) and long-term reward/payoff (Pay), and heuristic search to select the best sequence of actions. Our contributions are (1) a novel framing of the LLM planning problem in the context of heuristic planning, (2) integrating grounding and cost-effective elements into the generated plans, and (3) using heuristic search over actions. Our extensive evaluations show that our model surpasses other LLM planning approaches.

Deep Explainable Relational Reinforcement Learning: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach

Despite numerous successes in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), the learned policies are not interpretable. Moreover, since DRL does not exploit symbolic relational representations, it has difficulties in coping with structural changes in its environment (such as increasing the number of objects). Relational Reinforcement Learning, on the other hand, inherits the relational representations from symbolic planning to learn reusable policies. However, it has so far been unable to scale up and exploit the power of deep neural networks. We propose Deep Explainable Relational Reinforcement Learning (DERRL), a framework that exploits the best of both -- neural and symbolic worlds. By resorting to a neuro-symbolic approach, DERRL combines relational representations and constraints from symbolic planning with deep learning to extract interpretable policies. These policies are in the form of logical rules that explain how each decision (or action) is arrived at. Through several experiments, in setups like the Countdown Game, Blocks World, Gridworld, and Traffic, we show that the policies learned by DERRL can be applied to different configurations and contexts, hence generalizing to environmental modifications.

smProbLog: Stable Model Semantics in ProbLog for Probabilistic Argumentation

Argumentation problems are concerned with determining the acceptability of a set of arguments from their relational structure. When the available information is uncertain, probabilistic argumentation frameworks provide modelling tools to account for it. The first contribution of this paper is a novel interpretation of probabilistic argumentation frameworks as probabilistic logic programs. Probabilistic logic programs are logic programs in which some of the facts are annotated with probabilities. We show that the programs representing probabilistic argumentation frameworks do not satisfy a common assumption in probabilistic logic programming (PLP) semantics, which is, that probabilistic facts fully capture the uncertainty in the domain under investigation. The second contribution of this paper is then a novel PLP semantics for programs where a choice of probabilistic facts does not uniquely determine the truth assignment of the logical atoms. The third contribution of this paper is the implementation of a PLP system supporting this semantics: smProbLog. smProbLog is a novel PLP framework based on the probabilistic logic programming language ProbLog. smProbLog supports many inference and learning tasks typical of PLP, which, together with our first contribution, provide novel reasoning tools for probabilistic argumentation. We evaluate our approach with experiments analyzing the computational cost of the proposed algorithms and their application to a dataset of argumentation problems.