A fundamental challenge in neuro-symbolic AI is to devise primitives that fuse the logical and neural concepts. The Neural Theorem Prover has proposed the notion of soft-unification to turn the symbolic comparison between terms (i.e. unification) into a comparison in embedding space. It has been shown that soft-unification is a powerful mechanism that can be used to learn logic rules in an end-to-end differentiable manner. We study soft-unification from a conceptual point and outline several desirable properties of this operation. These include non-redundancy in the proof, well-defined proof scores, and non-sparse gradients. Unfortunately, these properties are not satisfied by previous systems such as the Neural Theorem Prover. Therefore, we introduce a more principled framework called DeepSoftLog based on probabilistic rather than fuzzy semantics. Our experiments demonstrate that DeepSoftLog can outperform the state-of-the-art on neuro-symbolic benchmarks, highlighting the benefits of these properties.
This research received funding from the Flemish Government (AI Research Program), the Flanders Research Foundation (FWO) under project G097720N, the KU Leuven Research Fund (C14/18/062) and TAILOR, a project from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under GA No 952215. Luc De Raedt is also supported by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.