Rule-Based Reasoning
Learning simple heuristic rules for classifying materials based on chemical composition
In the past decade, there has been a significant interest in the use of machine learning approaches in materials science research. Conventional deep learning approaches that rely on complex, nonlinear models have become increasingly important in computational materials science due to their high predictive accuracy. In contrast to these approaches, we have shown in a recent work that a remarkably simple learned heuristic rule -- based on the concept of topogivity -- can classify whether a material is topological using only its chemical composition. In this paper, we go beyond the topology classification scenario by also studying the use of machine learning to develop simple heuristic rules for classifying whether a material is a metal based on chemical composition. Moreover, we present a framework for incorporating chemistry-informed inductive bias based on the structure of the periodic table. For both the topology classification and the metallicity classification tasks, we empirically characterize the performance of simple heuristic rules fit with and without chemistry-informed inductive bias across a wide range of training set sizes. We find evidence that incorporating chemistry-informed inductive bias can reduce the amount of training data required to reach a given level of test accuracy.
The Dragon Hatchling: The Missing Link between the Transformer and Models of the Brain
Kosowski, Adrian, Uznaลski, Przemysลaw, Chorowski, Jan, Stamirowska, Zuzanna, Bartoszkiewicz, Michaล
The relationship between computing systems and the brain has served as motivation for pioneering theoreticians since John von Neumann and Alan Turing. Uniform, scale-free biological networks, such as the brain, have powerful properties, including generalizing over time, which is the main barrier for Machine Learning on the path to Universal Reasoning Models. We introduce `Dragon Hatchling' (BDH), a new Large Language Model architecture based on a scale-free biologically inspired network of \$n\$ locally-interacting neuron particles. BDH couples strong theoretical foundations and inherent interpretability without sacrificing Transformer-like performance. BDH is a practical, performant state-of-the-art attention-based state space sequence learning architecture. In addition to being a graph model, BDH admits a GPU-friendly formulation. It exhibits Transformer-like scaling laws: empirically BDH rivals GPT2 performance on language and translation tasks, at the same number of parameters (10M to 1B), for the same training data. BDH can be represented as a brain model. The working memory of BDH during inference entirely relies on synaptic plasticity with Hebbian learning using spiking neurons. We confirm empirically that specific, individual synapses strengthen connection whenever BDH hears or reasons about a specific concept while processing language inputs. The neuron interaction network of BDH is a graph of high modularity with heavy-tailed degree distribution. The BDH model is biologically plausible, explaining one possible mechanism which human neurons could use to achieve speech. BDH is designed for interpretability. Activation vectors of BDH are sparse and positive. We demonstrate monosemanticity in BDH on language tasks. Interpretability of state, which goes beyond interpretability of neurons and model parameters, is an inherent feature of the BDH architecture.
Transparent, Evaluable, and Accessible Data Agents: A Proof-of-Concept Framework
This article presents a modular, component-based architecture for developing and evaluating AI agents that bridge the gap between natural language interfaces and complex enterprise data warehouses. The system directly addresses core challenges in data accessibility by enabling non-technical users to interact with complex data warehouses through a conversational interface, translating ambiguous user intent into precise, executable database queries to overcome semantic gaps. A cornerstone of the design is its commitment to transparent decision-making, achieved through a multi-layered reasoning framework that explains the "why" behind every decision, allowing for full interpretability by tracing conclusions through specific, activated business rules and data points. The architecture integrates a robust quality assurance mechanism via an automated evaluation framework that serves multiple functions: it enables performance benchmarking by objectively measuring agent performance against golden standards, and it ensures system reliability by automating the detection of performance regressions during updates. The agent's analytical depth is enhanced by a statistical context module, which quantifies deviations from normative behavior, ensuring all conclusions are supported by quantitative evidence including concrete data, percentages, and statistical comparisons. We demonstrate the efficacy of this integrated agent-development-with-evaluation framework through a case study on an insurance claims processing system. The agent, built on a modular architecture, leverages the BigQuery ecosystem to perform secure data retrieval, apply domain-specific business rules, and generate human-auditable justifications. The results confirm that this approach creates a robust, evaluable, and trustworthy system for deploying LLM-powered agents in data-sensitive, high-stakes domains.
Automatic selection of primary studies in systematic reviews with evolutionary rule-based classification
de la Torre-Lรณpez, Josรฉ, Ramรญrez, Aurora, Romero, Josรฉ Raรบl
Conducting a SLR is especially useful when starting a new line of research, as it involves a detailed analysis of the research topic supported by the appropriate references. This type of secondary study should be conducted following a strict protocol to ensure quality and allow replication (Booth et al., 2016). Within the SLR process, manual and automated searches are performed to identify research papers related to the topic under review (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007). Therefore, the selection of primary studies, i.e., papers of sufficient quality and truly relevant to the topic, is one of the most important steps. It is also a time-consuming task due to potentially large search results if the queries are too open-ended or the research topic is too broad. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a way to assist researchers in this task, as well as in other stages of the SLR process (de la Torre-Lรณpez et al., 2023). The topic has gained even more relevance since the appearance of Large Language Models (LLMs) (Han et al., 2024; Galli et al., 2025). LLMs have expanded the capabilities of AI-assisted SLRs with the ability to extract information from papers, synthesise their findings and generate texts to accelerate SLR reporting.
Persistent Autoregressive Mapping with Traffic Rules for Autonomous Driving
Liang, Shiyi, Chang, Xinyuan, Wu, Changjie, Yan, Huiyuan, Bai, Yifan, Liu, Xinran, Zhang, Hang, Yuan, Yujian, Zeng, Shuang, Xu, Mu, Wei, Xing
Safe autonomous driving requires both accurate HD map construction and persistent awareness of traffic rules, even when their associated signs are no longer visible. However, existing methods either focus solely on geometric elements or treat rules as temporary classifications, failing to capture their persistent effectiveness across extended driving sequences. In this paper, we present PAMR (Persistent Autoregressive Mapping with Traffic Rules), a novel framework that performs autoregressive co-construction of lane vectors and traffic rules from visual observations. Our approach introduces two key mechanisms: Map-Rule Co-Construction for processing driving scenes in temporal segments, and Map-Rule Cache for maintaining rule consistency across these segments. To properly evaluate continuous and consistent map generation, we develop MapDRv2, featuring improved lane geometry annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAMR achieves superior performance in joint vector-rule mapping tasks, while maintaining persistent rule effectiveness throughout extended driving sequences.
Logic of Hypotheses: from Zero to Full Knowledge in Neurosymbolic Integration
Bizzaro, Davide, Daniele, Alessandro
Neurosymbolic integration (NeSy) blends neural-network learning with symbolic reasoning. The field can be split between methods injecting hand-crafted rules into neural models, and methods inducing symbolic rules from data. We introduce Logic of Hypotheses (LoH), a novel language that unifies these strands, enabling the flexible integration of data-driven rule learning with symbolic priors and expert knowledge. LoH extends propositional logic syntax with a choice operator, which has learnable parameters and selects a subformula from a pool of options. Using fuzzy logic, formulas in LoH can be directly compiled into a differentiable computational graph, so the optimal choices can be learned via backpropagation. This framework subsumes some existing NeSy models, while adding the possibility of arbitrary degrees of knowledge specification. Moreover, the use of Goedel fuzzy logic and the recently developed Goedel trick yields models that can be discretized to hard Boolean-valued functions without any loss in performance. We provide experimental analysis on such models, showing strong results on tabular data and on the Visual Tic-Tac-Toe NeSy task, while producing interpretable decision rules.
FlowDrive: moderated flow matching with data balancing for trajectory planning
Wang, Lingguang, Taล, รmer ลahin, Steiner, Marlon, Stiller, Christoph
Learning-based planners are sensitive to the long-tailed distribution of driving data. Common maneuvers dominate datasets, while dangerous or rare scenarios are sparse. This imbalance can bias models toward the frequent cases and degrade performance on critical scenarios. To tackle this problem, we compare balancing strategies for sampling training data and find reweighting by trajectory pattern an effective approach. We then present FlowDrive, a flow-matching trajectory planner that learns a conditional rectified flow to map noise directly to trajectory distributions with few flow-matching steps. We further introduce moderated, in-the-loop guidance that injects small perturbation between flow steps to systematically increase trajectory diversity while remaining scene-consistent. On nuPlan and the interaction-focused interPlan benchmarks, FlowDrive achieves state-of-the-art results among learning-based planners and approaches methods with rule-based refinements. After adding moderated guidance and light post-processing (FlowDrive*), it achieves overall state-of-the-art performance across nearly all benchmark splits.
Morphological Synthesizer for Ge'ez Language: Addressing Morphological Complexity and Resource Limitations
Gebremariam, Gebrearegawi, Teklehaymanot, Hailay, Mezgebe, Gebregewergs
Ge'ez is an ancient Semitic language renowned for its unique alphabet. It serves as the script for numerous languages, including Tigrinya and Amharic, and played a pivotal role in Ethiopia's cultural and religious development during the Aksumite kingdom era. Ge'ez remains significant as a liturgical language in Ethiopia and Eritrea, with much of the national identity documentation recorded in Ge'ez. These written materials are invaluable primary sources for studying Ethiopian and Eritrean philosophy, creativity, knowledge, and civilization. Ge'ez has a complex morphological structure with rich inflectional and derivational morphology, and no usable NLP has been developed and published until now due to the scarcity of annotated linguistic data, corpora, labeled datasets, and lexicons. Therefore, we propose a rule-based Ge'ez morphological synthesizer to generate surface words from root words according to the morphological structures of the language. We used 1,102 sample verbs, representing all verb morphological structures, to test and evaluate the system. The system achieves a performance of 97.4%, outperforming the baseline model and suggesting that future work should build a comprehensive system considering morphological variations of the language. Keywords: Ge'ez, NLP, morphology, morphological synthesizer, rule-based