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NeurIPS 2023

Soft-Unification in Deep Probabilistic Logic

Conference Paper Main Conference Track Artificial Intelligence · Machine Learning

Abstract

A fundamental challenge in neuro-symbolic AI is to devise primitives that fuse the logical and neural concepts. The Neural Theorem Prover has proposed the notion of soft-unification to turn the symbolic comparison between terms (i. e. unification) into a comparison in embedding space. It has been shown that soft-unification is a powerful mechanism that can be used to learn logic rules in an end-to-end differentiable manner. We study soft-unification from a conceptual point and outline several desirable properties of this operation. These include non-redundancy in the proof, well-defined proof scores, and non-sparse gradients. Unfortunately, these properties are not satisfied by previous systems such as the Neural Theorem Prover. Therefore, we introduce a more principled framework called DeepSoftLog based on probabilistic rather than fuzzy semantics. Our experiments demonstrate that DeepSoftLog can outperform the state-of-the-art on neuro-symbolic benchmarks, highlighting the benefits of these properties.

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Context

Venue
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Archive span
1987-2025
Indexed papers
30776
Paper id
182776663012243469
v2026.09.13