neuro-symbolic method
Explainable Diagnosis Prediction through Neuro-Symbolic Integration
Lu, Qiuhao, Li, Rui, Sagheb, Elham, Wen, Andrew, Wang, Jinlian, Wang, Liwei, Fan, Jungwei W., Liu, Hongfang
Diagnosis prediction is a critical task in healthcare, where timely and accurate identification of medical conditions can significantly impact patient outcomes. Traditional machine learning and deep learning models have achieved notable success in this domain but often lack interpretability which is a crucial requirement in clinical settings. In this study, we explore the use of neuro-symbolic methods, specifically Logical Neural Networks (LNNs), to develop explainable models for diagnosis prediction. Essentially, we design and implement LNN-based models that integrate domain-specific knowledge through logical rules with learnable thresholds. Our models, particularly $M_{\text{multi-pathway}}$ and $M_{\text{comprehensive}}$, demonstrate superior performance over traditional models such as Logistic Regression, SVM, and Random Forest, achieving higher accuracy (up to 80.52\%) and AUROC scores (up to 0.8457) in the case study of diabetes prediction. The learned weights and thresholds within the LNN models provide direct insights into feature contributions, enhancing interpretability without compromising predictive power. These findings highlight the potential of neuro-symbolic approaches in bridging the gap between accuracy and explainability in healthcare AI applications. By offering transparent and adaptable diagnostic models, our work contributes to the advancement of precision medicine and supports the development of equitable healthcare solutions. Future research will focus on extending these methods to larger and more diverse datasets to further validate their applicability across different medical conditions and populations.
Systematic Reasoning About Relational Domains With Graph Neural Networks
Khalid, Irtaza, Schockaert, Steven
Developing models that can learn to reason is a notoriously challenging problem. We focus on reasoning in relational domains, where the use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) seems like a natural choice. However, previous work on reasoning with GNNs has shown that such models tend to fail when presented with test examples that require longer inference chains than those seen during training. This suggests that GNNs lack the ability to generalize from training examples in a systematic way, which would fundamentally limit their reasoning abilities. A common solution is to instead rely on neuro-symbolic methods, which are capable of reasoning in a systematic way by design. Unfortunately, the scalability of such methods is often limited and they tend to rely on overly strong assumptions, e.g.\ that queries can be answered by inspecting a single relational path. In this paper, we revisit the idea of reasoning with GNNs, showing that systematic generalization is possible as long as the right inductive bias is provided. In particular, we argue that node embeddings should be treated as epistemic states and that GNN should be parameterised accordingly. We propose a simple GNN architecture which is based on this view and show that it is capable of achieving state-of-the-art results. We furthermore introduce a benchmark which requires models to aggregate evidence from multiple relational paths. We show that existing neuro-symbolic approaches fail on this benchmark, whereas our considered GNN model learns to reason accurately.
Neuro-Symbolic Reinforcement Learning with First-Order Logic
Kimura, Daiki, Ono, Masaki, Chaudhury, Subhajit, Kohita, Ryosuke, Wachi, Akifumi, Agravante, Don Joven, Tatsubori, Michiaki, Munawar, Asim, Gray, Alexander
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods often require many trials before convergence, and no direct interpretability of trained policies is provided. In order to achieve fast convergence and interpretability for the policy in RL, we propose a novel RL method for text-based games with a recent neuro-symbolic framework called Logical Neural Network, which can learn symbolic and interpretable rules in their differentiable network. The method is first to extract first-order logical facts from text observation and external word meaning network (ConceptNet), then train a policy in the network with directly interpretable logical operators. Our experimental results show RL training with the proposed method converges significantly faster than other state-of-the-art neuro-symbolic methods in a TextWorld benchmark.