English

A Semantic Loss Function for Deep Learning with Symbolic Knowledge

Artificial Intelligence 2018-06-11 v2 Machine Learning Logic in Computer Science Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper develops a novel methodology for using symbolic knowledge in deep learning. From first principles, we derive a semantic loss function that bridges between neural output vectors and logical constraints. This loss function captures how close the neural network is to satisfying the constraints on its output. An experimental evaluation shows that it effectively guides the learner to achieve (near-)state-of-the-art results on semi-supervised multi-class classification. Moreover, it significantly increases the ability of the neural network to predict structured objects, such as rankings and paths. These discrete concepts are tremendously difficult to learn, and benefit from a tight integration of deep learning and symbolic reasoning methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.11157,
  title  = {A Semantic Loss Function for Deep Learning with Symbolic Knowledge},
  author = {Jingyi Xu and Zilu Zhang and Tal Friedman and Yitao Liang and Guy Van den Broeck},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.11157},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

This version appears in the Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2018)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:01:43.492Z