Rule-Based Reasoning
Reviews: DRUM: End-To-End Differentiable Rule Mining On Knowledge Graphs
This paper proposes an interesting approach for differentiable, interpretable rule mining given a knowledge base. The major pro of the approach is its in an inductive setting without the need for negative examples, which excited the reviewers. Initially the paper lacked important comparisons to many related works, but the author did a good job in rebuttal. Please include the comparison results in the final version and the results on other datasets pointed out by the reviewers. I would like to recommend an acceptance to NeurIPS.
'America first' returns as Trump ditches focus on allies, rules-based order
Freshly returned to the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump signaled Monday that his administration would not focus on maintaining the rules-based global order or cultivating the American network of alliances. Instead, he vowed that the United States would be a dominating force that would take whatever steps necessary to advance American interests -- including flexing its economic muscle and, if necessary, employing its military strength. "We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer," Trump said in a speech that mainly focused on domestic issues following his swearing-in. "During every single day of the Trump administration, I will, very simply, put America first."
Interpreting Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Security via Rule Extraction
Many security applications require unsupervised anomaly detection, as malicious data are extremely rare and often only unlabeled normal data are available for training (i.e., zero-positive). However, security operators are concerned about the high stakes of trusting black-box models due to their lack of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a post-hoc method to globally explain a black-box unsupervised anomaly detection model via rule extraction.First, we propose the concept of distribution decomposition rules that decompose the complex distribution of normal data into multiple compositional distributions. To find such rules, we design an unsupervised Interior Clustering Tree that incorporates the model prediction into the splitting criteria. Then, we propose the Compositional Boundary Exploration (CBE) algorithm to obtain the boundary inference rules that estimate the decision boundary of the original model on each compositional distribution.
Scalable Rule-Based Representation Learning for Interpretable Classification
Rule-based models, e.g., decision trees, are widely used in scenarios demanding high model interpretability for their transparent inner structures and good model expressivity. However, rule-based models are hard to optimize, especially on large data sets, due to their discrete parameters and structures. Ensemble methods and fuzzy/soft rules are commonly used to improve performance, but they sacrifice the model interpretability. To obtain both good scalability and interpretability, we propose a new classifier, named Rule-based Representation Learner (RRL), that automatically learns interpretable non-fuzzy rules for data representation and classification. To train the non-differentiable RRL effectively, we project it to a continuous space and propose a novel training method, called Gradient Grafting, that can directly optimize the discrete model using gradient descent.
Learning Interpretable Decision Rule Sets: A Submodular Optimization Approach
Rule sets are highly interpretable logical models in which the predicates for decision are expressed in disjunctive normal form (DNF, OR-of-ANDs), or, equivalently, the overall model comprises an unordered collection of if-then decision rules. In this paper, we consider a submodular optimization based approach for learning rule sets. The learning problem is framed as a subset selection task in which a subset of all possible rules needs to be selected to form an accurate and interpretable rule set. We employ an objective function that exhibits submodularity and thus is amenable to submodular optimization techniques. To overcome the difficulty arose from dealing with the exponential-sized ground set of rules, the subproblem of searching a rule is casted as another subset selection task that asks for a subset of features.
CEDe: A collection of expert-curated datasets with atom-level entity annotations for Optical Chemical Structure Recognition
Optical Chemical Structure Recognition (OCSR) deals with the translation from chemical images to molecular structures, this being the main way chemical compounds are depicted in scientific documents. Traditionally, rule-based methods have followed a framework based on the detection of chemical entities, such as atoms and bonds, followed by a compound structure reconstruction step. Recently, neural architectures analog to image captioning have been explored to solve this task, yet they still show to be data inefficient, using millions of examples just to show performances comparable with traditional methods. Looking to motivate and benchmark new approaches based on atomic-level entities detection and graph reconstruction, we present CEDe, a unique collection of chemical entity bounding boxes manually curated by experts for scientific literature datasets. These annotations combine to more than 700,000 chemical entity bounding boxes with the necessary information for structure reconstruction.
Learning from Both Structural and Textual Knowledge for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion
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.
PLANS: Neuro-Symbolic Program Learning from Videos
Recent years have seen the rise of statistical program learning based on neural models as an alternative to traditional rule-based systems for programming by example. Rule-based approaches offer correctness guarantees in an unsupervised way as they inherently capture logical rules, while neural models are more realistically scalable to raw, high-dimensional input, and provide resistance to noisy I/O specifications. We introduce PLANS (Program LeArning from Neurally inferred Specifications), a hybrid model for program synthesis from visual observations that gets the best of both worlds, relying on (i) a neural architecture trained to extract abstract, high-level information from each raw individual input (ii) a rule-based system using the extracted information as I/O specifications to synthesize a program capturing the different observations. In order to address the key challenge of making PLANS resistant to noise in the network's output, we introduce a dynamic filtering algorithm for I/O specifications based on selective classification techniques. We obtain state-of-the-art performance at program synthesis from diverse demonstration videos in the Karel and ViZDoom environments, while requiring no ground-truth program for training.
Characterizations of voting rules based on majority margins
Ding, Yifeng, Holliday, Wesley H., Pacuit, Eric
In the context of voting with ranked ballots, an important class of voting rules is the class of margin-based rules (also called pairwise rules). A voting rule is margin-based if whenever two elections generate the same head-to-head margins of victory or loss between candidates, then the voting rule yields the same outcome in both elections. Although this is a mathematically natural invariance property to consider, whether it should be regarded as a normative axiom on voting rules is less clear. In this paper, we address this question for voting rules with any kind of output, whether a set of candidates, a ranking, a probability distribution, etc. We prove that a voting rule is margin-based if and only if it satisfies some axioms with clearer normative content. A key axiom is what we call Preferential Equality, stating that if two voters both rank a candidate $x$ immediately above a candidate $y$, then either voter switching to rank $y$ immediately above $x$ will have the same effect on the election outcome as if the other voter made the switch, so each voter's preference for $y$ over $x$ is treated equally.
IndoNLP 2025: Shared Task on Real-Time Reverse Transliteration for Romanized Indo-Aryan languages
Sumanathilaka, Deshan, Anuradha, Isuri, Weerasinghe, Ruvan, Micallef, Nicholas, Hough, Julian
The paper overviews the shared task on Real-Time Reverse Transliteration for Romanized Indo-Aryan languages. It focuses on the reverse transliteration of low-resourced languages in the Indo-Aryan family to their native scripts. Typing Romanized Indo-Aryan languages using ad-hoc transliterals and achieving accurate native scripts are complex and often inaccurate processes with the current keyboard systems. This task aims to introduce and evaluate a real-time reverse transliterator that converts Romanized Indo-Aryan languages to their native scripts, improving the typing experience for users. Out of 11 registered teams, four teams participated in the final evaluation phase with transliteration models for Sinhala, Hindi and Malayalam. These proposed solutions not only solve the issue of ad-hoc transliteration but also empower low-resource language usability in the digital arena.