Jianfeng Du

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

End-to-End Learning of LTLf Formulae by Faithful LTLf Encoding

• Hai Wan
• Pingjia Liang
• Jianfeng Du
• Weilin Luo
• Rongzhen Ye
• Bo Peng

It is important to automatically discover the underlying tree-structured formulae from large amounts of data. In this paper, we examine learning linear temporal logic on finite traces (LTLf) formulae, which is a tree structure syntactically and characterizes temporal properties semantically. Its core challenge is to bridge the gap between the concise tree-structured syntax and the complex LTLf semantics. Besides, the learning quality is endangered by explosion of the search space and wrong search bias guided by imperfect data. We tackle these challenges by proposing an LTLf encoding method to parameterize a neural network so that the neural computation is able to simulate the inference of LTLf formulae. We first identify faithful LTLf encoding, a subclass of LTLf encoding, which has a one-to-one correspondence to LTLf formulae. Faithful encoding guarantees that the learned parameter assignment of the neural network can directly be interpreted to an LTLf formula. With such an encoding method, we then propose an end-to-end approach, TLTLf, to learn LTLf formulae through neural networks parameterized by our LTLf encoding method. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with up to 7% improvement in accuracy, highlighting the benefits of introducing the faithful LTLf encoding.

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A Noise-Tolerant Differentiable Learning Approach for Single Occurrence Regular Expression with Interleaving

• Rongzhen Ye
• Tianqu Zhuang
• Hai Wan
• Jianfeng Du
• Weilin Luo
• Pingjia Liang

We study the problem of learning a single occurrence regular expression with interleaving (SOIRE) from a set of text strings possibly with noise. SOIRE fully supports interleaving and covers a large portion of regular expressions used in practice. Learning SOIREs is challenging because it requires heavy computation and text strings usually contain noise in practice. Most of the previous studies only learn restricted SOIREs and are not robust on noisy data. To tackle these issues, we propose a noise-tolerant differentiable learning approach SOIREDL for SOIRE. We design a neural network to simulate SOIRE matching and theoretically prove that certain assignments of the set of parameters learnt by the neural network, called faithful encodings, are one-to-one corresponding to SOIREs for a bounded size. Based on this correspondence, we interpret the target SOIRE from an assignment of the set of parameters of the neural network by exploring the nearest faithful encodings. Experimental results show that SOIREDL outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, especially on noisy data.

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Learning from Both Structural and Textual Knowledge for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion

• Kunxun Qi
• Jianfeng Du
• Hai Wan

Learning rule-based systems plays a pivotal role in knowledge graph completion (KGC). Existing rule-based systems restrict the input of the system to structural knowledge only, which may omit some useful knowledge for reasoning, e. g. , textual knowledge. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework that imposes both structural and textual knowledge to learn rule-based systems. In the first stage, we compute a set of triples with confidence scores (called \emph{soft triples}) from a text corpus by distant supervision, where a textual entailment model with multi-instance learning is exploited to estimate whether a given triple is entailed by a set of sentences. In the second stage, these soft triples are used to learn a rule-based model for KGC. To mitigate the negative impact of noise from soft triples, we propose a new formalism for rules to be learnt, named \emph{text enhanced rules} or \emph{TE-rules} for short. To effectively learn TE-rules, we propose a neural model that simulates the inference of TE-rules. We theoretically show that any set of TE-rules can always be interpreted by a certain parameter assignment of the neural model. We introduce three new datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. Experimental results demonstrate that the introduction of soft triples and TE-rules results in significant performance improvements in inductive link prediction.

AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Bridging LTLf Inference to GNN Inference for Learning LTLf Formulae

• Weilin Luo
• Pingjia Liang
• Jianfeng Du
• Hai Wan
• Bo Peng
• Delong Zhang

Learning linear temporal logic on finite traces (LTLf ) formulae aims to learn a target formula that characterizes the highlevel behavior of a system from observation traces in planning. Existing approaches to learning LTLf formulae, however, can hardly learn accurate LTLf formulae from noisy data. It is challenging to design an efficient search mechanism in the large search space in form of arbitrary LTLf formulae while alleviating the wrong search bias resulting from noisy data. In this paper, we tackle this problem by bridging LTLf inference to GNN inference. Our key theoretical contribution is showing that GNN inference can simulate LTLf inference to distinguish traces. Based on our theoretical result, we design a GNN-based approach, GLTLf, which combines GNN inference and parameter interpretation to seek the target formula in the large search space. Thanks to the non-deterministic learning process of GNNs, GLTLf is able to cope with noise. We evaluate GLTLf on various datasets with noise. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of GNN inference in learning LTLf formulae and show that GLTLf is superior to the state-of-the-art approaches.

IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Teaching LTLf Satisfiability Checking to Neural Networks

• Weilin Luo
• Hai Wan
• Jianfeng Du
• Xiaoda Li
• Yuze Fu
• Rongzhen Ye
• Delong Zhang

Linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTLf) satisfiability checking is a fundamental and hard (PSPACE-complete) problem in the artificial intelligence community. We explore teaching end-to-end neural networks to check satisfiability in polynomial time. It is a challenge to characterize the syntactic and semantic features of LTLf via neural networks. To tackle this challenge, we propose LTLfNet, a recursive neural network that captures syntactic features of LTLf by recursively combining the embeddings of sub-formulae. LTLfNet models permutation invariance and sequentiality in the semantics of LTLf through different aggregation mechanisms of sub-formulae. Experimental results demonstrate that LTLfNet achieves good performance in synthetic datasets and generalizes across large-scale datasets. They also show that LTLfNet is competitive with state-of-the-art symbolic approaches such as nuXmv and CDLSC.

AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

FL-MSRE: A Few-Shot Learning based Approach to Multimodal Social Relation Extraction

• Hai Wan
• Manrong Zhang
• Jianfeng Du
• Ziling Huang
• Yufei Yang
• Jeff Z. Pan

Social relation extraction (SRE for short), which aims to infer the social relation between two people in daily life, has been demonstrated to be of great value in reality. Existing methods for SRE consider extracting social relation only from unimodal information such as text or image, ignoring the high coupling of multimodal information. Moreover, previous studies overlook the serious unbalance distribution on social relations. To address these issues, this paper proposes FL-MSRE, a few-shot learning based approach to extracting social relations from both texts and face images. Considering the lack of multimodal social relation datasets, this paper also presents three multimodal datasets annotated from four classical masterpieces and corresponding TV series. Inspired by the success of BERT, we propose a strong BERT based baseline to extract social relation from text only. FL-MSRE is empirically shown to outperform the baseline significantly. This demonstrates that using face images benefits text-based SRE. Further experiments also show that using two faces from different images achieves similar performance as from the same image. This means that FL-MSRE is suitable for a wide range of SRE applications where the faces of two people can only be collected from different images. 1

AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Target-Aspect-Sentiment Joint Detection for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

• Hai Wan
• Yufei Yang
• Jianfeng Du
• Yanan Liu
• Kunxun Qi
• Jeff Z. Pan

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to detect the targets (which are composed by continuous words), aspects and sentiment polarities in text. Published datasets from SemEval-2015 and SemEval-2016 reveal that a sentiment polarity depends on both the target and the aspect. However, most of the existing methods consider predicting sentiment polarities from either targets or aspects but not from both, thus they easily make wrong predictions on sentiment polarities. In particular, where the target is implicit, i. e. , it does not appear in the given text, the methods predicting sentiment polarities from targets do not work. To tackle these limitations in ABSA, this paper proposes a novel method for target-aspectsentiment joint detection. It relies on a pre-trained language model and can capture the dependence on both targets and aspects for sentiment prediction. Experimental results on the SemEval-2015 and SemEval-2016 restaurant datasets show that the proposed method achieves a high performance in detecting target-aspect-sentiment triples even for the implicit target cases; moreover, it even outperforms the state-of-theart methods for those subtasks of target-aspect-sentiment detection that they are competent to.

AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Translation-Based Matching Adversarial Network for Cross-Lingual Natural Language Inference

• Kunxun Qi
• Jianfeng Du

Cross-lingual natural language inference is a fundamental task in cross-lingual natural language understanding, widely addressed by neural models recently. Existing neural model based methods either align sentence embeddings between source and target languages, heavily relying on annotated parallel corpora, or exploit pre-trained cross-lingual language models that are fine-tuned on a single language and hard to transfer knowledge to another language. To resolve these limitations in existing methods, this paper proposes an adversarial training framework to enhance both pre-trained models and classical neural models for cross-lingual natural language inference. It trains on the union of data in the source language and data in the target language, learning language-invariant features to improve the inference performance. Experimental results on the XNLI benchmark demonstrate that three popular neural models enhanced by the proposed framework significantly outperform the original models.

AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Validation of Growing Knowledge Graphs by Abductive Text Evidences

• Jianfeng Du
• Jeff Z. Pan
• Sylvia Wang
• Kunxun Qi
• Yuming Shen
• Yu Deng

This paper proposes a validation mechanism for newly added triples in a growing knowledge graph. Given a logical theory, a knowledge graph, a text corpus, and a new triple to be validated, this mechanism computes a sorted list of explanations for the new triple to facilitate the validation of it, where an explanation, called an abductive text evidence, is a set of pairs of the form (triple, window) where appending the set of triples on the left to the knowledge graph enforces entailment of the new triple under the logical theory, while every sentence window on the right which is contained in the text corpus explains to some degree why the triple on the left is true. From the angle of practice, a special class of abductive text evidences called TEP-based abductive text evidence is proposed, which is constructed from explanation patterns seen before in the knowledge graph. Accordingly, a method for computing the complete set of TEP-based abductive text evidences is proposed. Moreover, a method for sorting abductive text evidences based on distantly supervised learning is proposed. To evaluate the proposed validation mechanism, four knowledge graphs with logical theories are constructed from the four great classical masterpieces of Chinese literature. Experimental results on these datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.

AAAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Practical TBox Abduction Based on Justification Patterns

• Jianfeng Du
• Hai Wan
• Huaguan Ma

TBox abduction explains why an observation is not entailed by a TBox, by computing multiple sets of axioms, called explanations, such that each explanation does not entail the observation alone while appending an explanation to the TBox renders the observation entailed but does not introduce incoherence. Considering that practical explanations in TBox abduction are likely to mimic minimal explanations for TBox entailments, we introduce admissible explanations which are subsets of those justifications for the observation that are instantiated from a finite set of justification patterns. A justification pattern is obtained from a minimal set of axioms responsible for a certain atomic concept inclusion by replacing all concept (resp. role) names with concept (resp. role) variables. The number of admissible explanations is finite but can still be so large that computing all admissible explanations is impractical. Thus, we introduce a variant of subset-minimality, written ⊆ds-minimality, which prefers fresh (concept or role) names than existing names. We propose efficient methods for computing all admissible ⊆ds-minimal explanations and for computing all justification patterns, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that combining the proposed methods is able to achieve a practical approach to TBox abduction.

AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Towards Tractable and Practical ABox Abduction over Inconsistent Description Logic Ontologies

• Jianfeng Du
• Kewen Wang
• Yi-Dong Shen

ABox abduction plays an important role in reasoning over description logic (DL) ontologies. However, it does not work with inconsistent DL ontologies. To tackle this problem while achieving tractability, we generalize ABox abduction from the classical semantics to an inconsistency-tolerant semantics, namely the Intersection ABox Repair (IAR) semantics, and propose the notion of IAR-explanations in inconsistent DL ontologies. We show that computing all minimal IARexplanations is tractable in data complexity for first-order rewritable ontologies. However, the computational method may still not be practical due to a possibly large number of minimal IAR-explanations. Hence we propose to use preference information to reduce the number of explanations to be computed. In particular, based on the specificity of explanations, we introduce the notion of ⊆cps-cminimal IARexplanations, which can be computed in a highly efficient way. Accordingly, we propose a tractable level-wise method for computing all ⊆cps-cminimal IAR-explanations in a firstorder rewritable ontology. Experimental results on benchmarks of inconsistent ontologies show that the proposed method scales to tens of millions of assertions and can be of practical use.

AAAI Conference 2014 Conference Paper

A Tractable Approach to ABox Abduction over Description Logic Ontologies

• Jianfeng Du
• Kewen Wang
• Yi-Dong Shen

ABox abduction is an important reasoning mechanism for description logic ontologies. It computes all minimal explanations (sets of ABox assertions) whose appending to a consistent ontology enforces the entailment of an observation while keeps the ontology consistent. We focus on practical computation for a general problem of ABox abduction, called the query abduction problem, where an observation is a Boolean conjunctive query and the explanations may contain fresh individuals neither in the ontology nor in the observation. However, in this problem there can be infinitely many minimal explanations. Hence we first identify a class of TBoxes called first-order rewritable TBoxes. It guarantees the existence of finitely many minimal explanations and is sufficient for many ontology applications. To reduce the number of explanations that need to be computed, we introduce a special kind of minimal explanations called representative explanations from which all minimal explanations can be retrieved. We develop a tractable method (in data complexity) for computing all representative explanations in a consistent ontology. Experimental results demonstrate that the method is efficient and scalable for ontologies with large ABoxes.

LORI Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Efficient Action Extraction with Many-to-Many Relationship between Actions and Features

• Jianfeng Du
• Yong Hu 0002
• Charles X. Ling
• Ming Fan
• Mei Liu

Real-world problems often call for efficient methods to discovery actionable knowledge on which business can directly act [3]. Some works for discovering actionable knowledge [3, 5] view actions as behaviors which render a state of an instance into a preferred state, where a state is represented by feature values of the instance and whether a state is preferred is determined by a classifier. Actions usually have many-to-many relations with features of an instance. That is, an action may affect multiple features of an instance, and vise versa, a feature may be influenced by multiple actions. This type of many-to-many relationships between actions and features is prevalent in real-world applications. However, most existing works [3, 5] only deal with one-to-one relationship and ignore manyto- many relationship between actions and features. In these works, an action is treated as a behavior with a fixed execution cost. Restricting to a one-to-one relationship between actions and features may not yield an action set (i. e. a set of actions) with the minimal total execution cost. Moreover, one-to-one relationship is simply a special case of many-to-many relationship, and hence the latter will be applicable to more real-world problems. Therefore we aim to extract action sets from a classifier for which the total execution cost is minimal based on many-to-many relationship between actions and features.

AAAI Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Towards Practical ABox Abduction in Large OWL DL Ontologies

• Jianfeng Du
• Guilin Qi
• Yi-Dong Shen
• Jeff Pan

ABox abduction is an important aspect for abductive reasoning in Description Logics (DLs). It finds all minimal sets of ABox axioms that should be added to a background ontology to enforce entailment of a specified set of ABox axioms. As far as we know, by now there is only one ABox abduction method in expressive DLs computing abductive solutions with certain minimality. However, the method targets an ABox abduction problem that may have infinitely many abductive solutions and may not output an abductive solution in finite time. Hence, in this paper we propose a new ABox abduction problem which has only finitely many abductive solutions and also propose a novel method to solve it. The method reduces the original problem to an abduction problem in logic programming and solves it with Prolog engines. Experimental results show that the method is able to compute abductive solutions in benchmark OWL DL ontologies with large ABoxes.

UAI Conference 2010 Conference Paper

Merging Knowledge Bases in Possibilistic Logic by Lexicographic Aggregation

• Guilin Qi
• Jianfeng Du
• Weiru Liu
• David A. Bell

Belief merging is an important but difficult problem in Artificial Intelligence, especially when sources of information are pervaded with uncertainty. Many merging operators have been proposed to deal with this problem in possibilistic logic, a weighted logic which is powerful for handling inconsistency and dealing with uncertainty. They often result in a possibilistic knowledge base which is a set of weighted formulas. Although possibilistic logic is inconsistency tolerant, it suffers from the well-known “drowning effect”. Therefore, we may still want to obtain a consistent possibilistic knowledge base as the result of merging. In such a case, we argue that it is not always necessary to keep weighted information after merging. In this paper, we define a merging operator that maps a set of possibilistic knowledge bases and a formula representing the integrity constraints to a classical knowledge base by using lexicographic ordering. We show that it satisfies nine postulates that generalize basic postulates for propositional merging given in [11]. These postulates capture the principle of minimal change in some sense. We then provide an algorithm for generating the resulting knowledge base of our merging operator. Finally, we discuss the compatibility of our merging operator with propositional merging and establish the advantage of our merging operator over existing semantic merging operators in the propositional case.

IJCAI Conference 2009 Conference Paper

• Guilin Qi
• Jianfeng Du

The problem of revising an ontology consistently is closely related to the problem of belief revision which has been widely discussed in the literature. Some syntax-based belief revision operators have been adapted to revise ontologies in Description Logics (DLs). However, these operators remove the whole axioms to resolve logical contradictions and thus are not fine-grained. In this paper, we propose three model-based revision operators to revise terminologies in DLs. We show that one of them is more rational than others by comparing their logical properties. Therefore, we focus on this revision operator. We also consider the problem of computing the result of revision by our operator with the help of the notion of concept forgetting. Finally, we analyze the computational complexity of our revision operator.