Humans have the remarkable ability to recognize and acquire novel visual concepts in a zero-shot manner. Given a high-level, symbolic description of a novel concept in terms of previously learned visual concepts and their relations, humans can recognize novel concepts without seeing any examples. Moreover, they can acquire new concepts by parsing and communicating symbolic structures using learned visual concepts and relations. Endowing these capabilities in machines is pivotal in improving their generalization capability at inference time. In this work, we introduce Zero-shot Concept Recognition and Acquisition (ZeroC), a neuro-symbolic architecture that can recognize and acquire novel concepts in a zero-shot way.

Artificial intelligence deployed in risk-sensitive domains such as healthcare, finance, and security must not only achieve predictive accuracy but also ensure transparency, ethical alignment, and compliance with regulatory expectations. Hybrid neuro symbolic models combine the pattern-recognition strengths of neural networks with the interpretability and logical rigor of symbolic reasoning, making them well-suited for these contexts. This paper surveys hybrid architectures, ethical design considerations, and deployment patterns that balance accuracy with accountability. We highlight techniques for integrating knowledge graphs with deep inference, embedding fairness-aware rules, and generating human-readable explanations. Through case studies in healthcare decision support, financial risk management, and autonomous infrastructure, we show how hybrid systems can deliver reliable and auditable AI. Finally, we outline evaluation protocols and future directions for scaling neuro symbolic frameworks in complex, high stakes environments.

Rule-based models offer interpretability but struggle with complex data, while deep neural networks excel in performance yet lack transparency. This work investigates a neuro-symbolic rule learning neural network named RL-Net that learns interpretable rule lists through neural optimization, applied for the first time to radar-based hand gesture recognition (HGR). We benchmark RL-Net against a fully transparent rule-based system (MIRA) and an explainable black-box model (XentricAI), evaluating accuracy, interpretability, and user adaptability via transfer learning. Our results show that RL-Net achieves a favorable trade-off, maintaining strong performance (93.03% F1) while significantly reducing rule complexity. We identify optimization challenges specific to rule pruning and hierarchy bias and propose stability-enhancing modifications. Compared to MIRA and XentricAI, RL-Net emerges as a practical middle ground between transparency and performance. This study highlights the real-world feasibility of neuro-symbolic models for interpretable HGR and offers insights for extending explainable AI to edge-deployable sensing systems.

Despite the practical success of Artificial Intelligence (AI), current neural AI algorithms face two significant issues. First, the decisions made by neural architectures are often prone to bias and brittleness. Second, when a chain of reasoning is required, neural systems often perform poorly. Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence is a promising approach that tackles these (and other) weaknesses by combining the power of neural perception and symbolic reasoning. Meanwhile, the success of AI has made it critical to understand its behaviour, leading to the development of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). While neuro-symbolic AI systems have important advantages over purely neural AI, we still need to explain their actions, which are obscured by the interactions of the neural and symbolic components. To address the issue, this paper proposes a formal approach to explaining the decisions of neuro-symbolic systems. The approach hinges on the use of formal abductive explanations and on solving the neuro-symbolic explainability problem hierarchically. Namely, it first computes a formal explanation for the symbolic component of the system, which serves to identify a subset of the individual parts of neural information that needs to be explained. This is followed by explaining only those individual neural inputs, independently of each other, which facilitates succinctness of hierarchical formal explanations and helps to increase the overall performance of the approach. Experimental results for a few complex reasoning tasks demonstrate practical efficiency of the proposed approach, in comparison to purely neural systems, from the perspective of explanation size, explanation time, training time, model sizes, and the quality of explanations reported.

Humans have the remarkable ability to recognize and acquire novel visual concepts in a zero-shot manner. Given a high-level, symbolic description of a novel concept in terms of previously learned visual concepts and their relations, humans can recognize novel concepts without seeing any examples. Moreover, they can acquire new concepts by parsing and communicating symbolic structures using learned visual concepts and relations. Endowing these capabilities in machines is pivotal in improving their generalization capability at inference time. In this work, we introduce Zero-shot Concept Recognition and Acquisition (ZeroC), a neuro-symbolic architecture that can recognize and acquire novel concepts in a zero-shot way.

Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence is a novel area of AI research which seeks to combine traditional rules-based AI approaches with modern deep learning techniques. Neuro-symbolic models have already demonstrated the capability to outperform state-of-the-art deep learning models in domains such as image and video reasoning. They have also been shown to obtain high accuracy with significantly less training data than traditional models. Due to the recency of the field's emergence and relative sparsity of published results, the performance characteristics of these models are not well understood. In this paper, we describe and analyze the performance characteristics of three recent neuro-symbolic models. We find that symbolic models have less potential parallelism than traditional neural models due to complex control flow and low-operational-intensity operations, such as scalar multiplication and tensor addition. However, the neural aspect of computation dominates the symbolic part in cases where they are clearly separable. We also find that data movement poses a potential bottleneck, as it does in many ML workloads.

Most explanation methods in deep learning map importance estimates for a model's prediction back to the original input space. These "visual" explanations are often insufficient, as the model's actual concept remains elusive. Moreover, without insights into the model's semantic concept, it is difficult -- if not impossible -- to intervene on the model's behavior via its explanations, called Explanatory Interactive Learning. Consequently, we propose to intervene on a Neuro-Symbolic scene representation, which allows one to revise the model on the semantic level, e.g. "never focus on the color to make your decision". We compiled a novel confounded visual scene data set, the CLEVR-Hans data set, capturing complex compositions of different objects. The results of our experiments on CLEVR-Hans demonstrate that our semantic explanations, i.e. compositional explanations at a per-object level, can identify confounders that are not identifiable using "visual" explanations only. More importantly, feedback on this semantic level makes it possible to revise the model from focusing on these confounding factors.