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arXiv:1711.04574cs.NE

Learning Explanatory Rules from Noisy Data

Richard Evans, Edward Grefenstette

Abstract

Artificial Neural Networks are powerful function approximators capable of modelling solutions to a wide variety of problems, both supervised and unsupervised. As their size and expressivity increases, so too does the variance of the model, yielding a nearly ubiquitous overfitting problem. Although mitigated by a variety of model regularisation methods, the common cure is to seek large amounts of training data---which is not necessarily easily obtained---that sufficiently approximates the data distribution of the domain we wish to test on. In contrast, logic programming methods such as Inductive Logic Programming offer an extremely data-efficient process by which models can be trained to reason on symbolic domains. However, these methods are unable to deal with the variety of domains neural networks can be applied to: they are not robust to noise in or mislabelling of inputs, and perhaps more importantly, cannot be applied to non-symbolic domains where the data is ambiguous, such as operating on raw pixels. In this paper, we propose a Differentiable Inductive Logic framework, which can not only solve tasks which traditional ILP systems are suited for, but shows a robustness to noise and error in the training data which ILP cannot cope with. Furthermore, as it is trained by backpropagation against a likelihood objective, it can be hybridised by connecting it with neural networks over ambiguous data in order to be applied to domains which ILP cannot address, while providing data efficiency and generalisation beyond what neural networks on their own can achieve.

arXiv comments
64 pages, to appear in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (Special Track on Deep Learning, Knowledge Representation, and Reasoning)
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.NENeural and Evolutionary Computing math.LOLogic

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Linked by 3 identifiable commenters in 9 comments across 9 threads, from Jun 2018 to Sep 2021. Found in 2 HN submissions from Nov 2017 to Feb 2018. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments9 threads

    • You're not too far off. The big advantage of ILP with respect to statistical techniques is the really extraordinary sample efficiency. Just a couple of examples are enough to learn many programs [1]. Moreover, ILP is pretty much the only machine learning approach that can make…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

  1. AI Expert Roadmap 1 comment
    • Aren't you shifting the goalposts a bit? First you ask me how I'd solve this problem with ILP: “Given three strings n1, n2, and n3, return true if length(n1) < length(n2) < length(n3), and false otherwise” (a) I say this is a trivial problem to solve with ILP and I show you a…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

    • Hi. ILP is Inductive Logic Programming, a form of logic-based, symbolic machine learning. ILP "models" are first-order logic theories that are not differentiable. To put it plainly, most ILP algorithms learn Prolog programs from examples and background knowledge which are also…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

    • Ah, but this is the great thing about ILP, including the δILP system in the article- that the "models" are actually logical theories that can be directly inspected (by reading them!) and verified. So we don't have to wonder whether the model learned by the algorithm will…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

    • Btw, if you have relational data and a few good people with strong computer science backgrounds rather than statisticians or mathematicians, have a look at Inductive Logic Programming. ILP is a set of machine learning techniques that learn logic programs from logic programs. The…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

    • Its a long article but he’s advocating for a hybrid approach to deal with problems that DNNs encounter today which he believes are fundamental to DNNs (reasoning, causality). An example of such an approach taken with success is given at the end…

      omezeView on HNParent context

    • Actually, I wasn't thinking of any specific methods, but now that you mentioned it, Inductive Logic Progamming (the subject of my PhD - see my comment about being biased) is a fine example. For a slightly more impartial opinion, here's a DeepMind paper that performs neural ILP…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

  2. AI Nationalism 1 comment
    • Has there been a misunderstanding of my comment? I didn't mean to say that I expect "AI to go away". For one thing, I certainly do not equate all of AI to deep learning, or even machine learning. My point is that deep learning has generated a lot of excitement in the last few…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

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