English

Learning Compositional Symbolic Task Rules from Demonstrations with Inductive Logic Programming

Robotics 2026-05-27 v1

Abstract

Learning from Demonstration~(LfD) should capture not only how a task is executed, but also its high-level task structure that explains the demonstrated behavior. As robots become more autonomous, such task representations must be inspectable, reusable, and human-interpretable. To address this, we study how to represent and learn robotic tasks with inductive logic programming~(ILP) by decomposing a complex task into a series of simpler learning objectives at different abstraction (ontological) levels. The system infers symbolic rules from demonstrations and prior (domain) knowledge, and reuses learned rules when learning higher-level task structure. We evaluate the approach in a synthetic block-assembly scenario and show that the learned abstractions are interpretable and support strong generalization to harder, held-out tasks with unseen objects. These results provide preliminary evidence that decomposed ILP is a feasible approach to task-level LfD.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.26828,
  title  = {Learning Compositional Symbolic Task Rules from Demonstrations with Inductive Logic Programming},
  author = {Oleh Borys and Karla Stepanova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26828},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

In: ICRA 2026 Workshop on Semantics for Reliable Robot Autonomy: From Environment Understanding and Reasoning to Safe Interaction, Vienna, 2026 In: ICRA 2026, International Joint Workshop on Ontologies, Semantic Maps and Autonomous Robotics Standardization (J-WOSMARS 2026), Vienna, 2026