FFNSL: Feed-Forward Neural-Symbolic Learner

Cunnington, Daniel; Law, Mark; Lobo, Jorge; Russo, Alessandra

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10994-022-06278-6

FFNSL: Feed-Forward Neural-Symbolic Learner

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Cunnington D, Law M, Lobo J, Russo A. FFNSL: Feed-Forward Neural-Symbolic Learner. Mach Learn. 2023 Feb;112(2):515-69. DOI: 10.1007/s10994-022-06278-6

Abstract

Logic-based machine learning aims to learn general, interpretable knowledge in a data-efficient manner. However, labelled data must be specified in a structured logical form. To address this limitation, we propose a neural-symbolic learning framework, called Feed-Forward Neural-Symbolic Learner (FFNSL), that integrates a logic-based machine learning system capable of learning from noisy examples, with neural networks, in order to learn interpretable knowledge from labelled unstructured data. We demonstrate the generality of FFNSL on four neural-symbolic classification problems, where different pre-trained neural network models and logic-based machine learning systems are integrated to learn interpretable knowledge from sequences of images. We evaluate the robustness of our framework by using images subject to distributional shifts, for which the pre-trained neural networks may predict incorrectly and with high confidence. We analyse the impact that these shifts have on the accuracy of the learned knowledge and run-time performance, comparing FFNSL to tree-based and pure neural approaches. Our experimental results show that FFNSL outperforms the baselines by learning more accurate and interpretable knowledge with fewer examples.