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Luc De Raedt

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Published work

23 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

DeepLog: A Software Framework for Modular Neurosymbolic AI

DeepLog is an operational neurosymbolic framework that unifies logic and deep learning within standard PyTorch workflows. While existing neurosymbolic systems focus on a particular paradigm and semantics, DeepLog serves as a universal backend that can emulate many systems in the neurosymbolic alphabet soup. By treating diverse neurosymbolic languages as high-level specifications, the DeepLog software automatically compiles them into optimized arithmetic circuits. This design lowers the barrier for machine learning practitioners by treating logic as composable modules, while providing neurosymbolic developers with a shared, high-performance basis for prototyping new integration strategies. The code is available here: https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/deeplog

preprint2024arXiv

From Statistical Relational to Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence: a Survey

This survey explores the integration of learning and reasoning in two different fields of artificial intelligence: neurosymbolic and statistical relational artificial intelligence. Neurosymbolic artificial intelligence (NeSy) studies the integration of symbolic reasoning and neural networks, while statistical relational artificial intelligence (StarAI) focuses on integrating logic with probabilistic graphical models. This survey identifies seven shared dimensions between these two subfields of AI. These dimensions can be used to characterize different NeSy and StarAI systems. They are concerned with (1) the approach to logical inference, whether model or proof-based; (2) the syntax of the used logical theories; (3) the logical semantics of the systems and their extensions to facilitate learning; (4) the scope of learning, encompassing either parameter or structure learning; (5) the presence of symbolic and subsymbolic representations; (6) the degree to which systems capture the original logic, probabilistic, and neural paradigms; and (7) the classes of learning tasks the systems are applied to. By positioning various NeSy and StarAI systems along these dimensions and pointing out similarities and differences between them, this survey contributes fundamental concepts for understanding the integration of learning and reasoning.

preprint2024arXiv

SayCanPay: Heuristic Planning with Large Language Models using Learnable Domain Knowledge

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive planning abilities due to their vast "world knowledge". Yet, obtaining plans that are both feasible (grounded in affordances) and cost-effective (in plan length), remains a challenge, despite recent progress. This contrasts with heuristic planning methods that employ domain knowledge (formalized in action models such as PDDL) and heuristic search to generate feasible, optimal plans. Inspired by this, we propose to combine the power of LLMs and heuristic planning by leveraging the world knowledge of LLMs and the principles of heuristic search. Our approach, SayCanPay, employs LLMs to generate actions (Say) guided by learnable domain knowledge, that evaluates actions' feasibility (Can) and long-term reward/payoff (Pay), and heuristic search to select the best sequence of actions. Our contributions are (1) a novel framing of the LLM planning problem in the context of heuristic planning, (2) integrating grounding and cost-effective elements into the generated plans, and (3) using heuristic search over actions. Our extensive evaluations show that our model surpasses other LLM planning approaches.

preprint2023arXiv

First-Order Context-Specific Likelihood Weighting in Hybrid Probabilistic Logic Programs

Statistical relational AI and probabilistic logic programming have so far mostly focused on discrete probabilistic models. The reasons for this is that one needs to provide constructs to succinctly model the independencies in such models, and also provide efficient inference. Three types of independencies are important to represent and exploit for scalable inference in hybrid models: conditional independencies elegantly modeled in Bayesian networks, context-specific independencies naturally represented by logical rules, and independencies amongst attributes of related objects in relational models succinctly expressed by combining rules. This paper introduces a hybrid probabilistic logic programming language, DC#, which integrates distributional clauses' syntax and semantics principles of Bayesian logic programs. It represents the three types of independencies qualitatively. More importantly, we also introduce the scalable inference algorithm FO-CS-LW for DC#. FO-CS-LW is a first-order extension of the context-specific likelihood weighting algorithm (CS-LW), a novel sampling method that exploits conditional independencies and context-specific independencies in ground models. The FO-CS-LW algorithm upgrades CS-LW with unification and combining rules to the first-order case.

preprint2022arXiv

Automating Data Science: Prospects and Challenges

Given the complexity of typical data science projects and the associated demand for human expertise, automation has the potential to transform the data science process. Key insights: * Automation in data science aims to facilitate and transform the work of data scientists, not to replace them. * Important parts of data science are already being automated, especially in the modeling stages, where techniques such as automated machine learning (AutoML) are gaining traction. * Other aspects are harder to automate, not only because of technological challenges, but because open-ended and context-dependent tasks require human interaction.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning MAX-SAT from Contextual Examples for Combinatorial Optimisation

Combinatorial optimisation problems are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence. Designing the underlying models, however, requires substantial expertise, which is a limiting factor in practice. The models typically consist of hard and soft constraints, or combine hard constraints with an objective function. We introduce a novel setting for learning combinatorial optimisation problems from contextual examples. These positive and negative examples show - in a particular context - whether the solutions are good enough or not. We develop our framework using the MAX-SAT formalism as it is simple yet powerful setting having these features. We study the learnability of MAX-SAT models. Our theoretical results show that high-quality MAX-SAT models can be learned from contextual examples in the realisable and agnostic settings, as long as the data satisfies an intuitive "representativeness" condition. We also contribute two implementations based on our theoretical results: one leverages ideas from syntax-guided synthesis while the other makes use of stochastic local search techniques. The two implementations are evaluated by recovering synthetic and benchmark models from contextual examples. The experimental results support our theoretical analysis, showing that MAX-SAT models can be learned from contextual examples. Among the two implementations, the stochastic local search learner scales much better than the syntax-guided implementation while providing comparable or better models.

preprint2022arXiv

Lifted Model Checking for Relational MDPs

Probabilistic model checking has been developed for verifying systems that have stochastic and nondeterministic behavior. Given a probabilistic system, a probabilistic model checker takes a property and checks whether or not the property holds in that system. For this reason, probabilistic model checking provide rigorous guarantees. So far, however, probabilistic model checking has focused on propositional models where a state is represented by a symbol. On the other hand, it is commonly required to make relational abstractions in planning and reinforcement learning. Various frameworks handle relational domains, for instance, STRIPS planning and relational Markov Decision Processes. Using propositional model checking in relational settings requires one to ground the model, which leads to the well known state explosion problem and intractability. We present pCTL-REBEL, a lifted model checking approach for verifying pCTL properties of relational MDPs. It extends REBEL, a relational model-based reinforcement learning technique, toward relational pCTL model checking. PCTL-REBEL is lifted, which means that rather than grounding, the model exploits symmetries to reason about a group of objects as a whole at the relational level. Theoretically, we show that pCTL model checking is decidable for relational MDPs that have a possibly infinite domain, provided that the states have a bounded size. Practically, we contribute algorithms and an implementation of lifted relational model checking, and we show that the lifted approach improves the scalability of the model checking approach.

preprint2020arXiv

Discovering Textual Structures: Generative Grammar Induction using Template Trees

Natural language generation provides designers with methods for automatically generating text, e.g. for creating summaries, chatbots and game content. In practise, text generators are often either learned and hard to interpret, or created by hand using techniques such as grammars and templates. In this paper, we introduce a novel grammar induction algorithm for learning interpretable grammars for generative purposes, called Gitta. We also introduce the novel notion of template trees to discover latent templates in corpora to derive these generative grammars. By using existing human-created grammars, we found that the algorithm can reasonably approximate these grammars using only a few examples. These results indicate that Gitta could be used to automatically learn interpretable and easily modifiable grammars, and thus provide a stepping stone for human-machine co-creation of generative models.

preprint2020arXiv

From Statistical Relational to Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence

Neuro-symbolic and statistical relational artificial intelligence both integrate frameworks for learning with logical reasoning. This survey identifies several parallels across seven different dimensions between these two fields. These cannot only be used to characterize and position neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence approaches but also to identify a number of directions for further research.

preprint2020arXiv

Human-Machine Collaboration for Democratizing Data Science

Everybody wants to analyse their data, but only few posses the data science expertise to to this. Motivated by this observation we introduce a novel framework and system \textsc{VisualSynth} for human-machine collaboration in data science. It wants to democratize data science by allowing users to interact with standard spreadsheet software in order to perform and automate various data analysis tasks ranging from data wrangling, data selection, clustering, constraint learning, predictive modeling and auto-completion. \textsc{VisualSynth} relies on the user providing colored sketches, i.e., coloring parts of the spreadsheet, to partially specify data science tasks, which are then determined and executed using artificial intelligence techniques.

preprint2020arXiv

Semiring Programming: A Declarative Framework for Generalized Sum Product Problems

To solve hard problems, AI relies on a variety of disciplines such as logic, probabilistic reasoning, machine learning and mathematical programming. Although it is widely accepted that solving real-world problems requires an integration amongst these, contemporary representation methodologies offer little support for this. In an attempt to alleviate this situation, we introduce a new declarative programming framework that provides abstractions of well-known problems such as SAT, Bayesian inference, generative models, and convex optimization. The semantics of programs is defined in terms of first-order structures with semiring labels, which allows us to freely combine and integrate problems from different AI disciplines.

preprint2020arXiv

Symbolic Learning and Reasoning with Noisy Data for Probabilistic Anchoring

Robotic agents should be able to learn from sub-symbolic sensor data, and at the same time, be able to reason about objects and communicate with humans on a symbolic level. This raises the question of how to overcome the gap between symbolic and sub-symbolic artificial intelligence. We propose a semantic world modeling approach based on bottom-up object anchoring using an object-centered representation of the world. Perceptual anchoring processes continuous perceptual sensor data and maintains a correspondence to a symbolic representation. We extend the definitions of anchoring to handle multi-modal probability distributions and we couple the resulting symbol anchoring system to a probabilistic logic reasoner for performing inference. Furthermore, we use statistical relational learning to enable the anchoring framework to learn symbolic knowledge in the form of a set of probabilistic logic rules of the world from noisy and sub-symbolic sensor input. The resulting framework, which combines perceptual anchoring and statistical relational learning, is able to maintain a semantic world model of all the objects that have been perceived over time, while still exploiting the expressiveness of logical rules to reason about the state of objects which are not directly observed through sensory input data. To validate our approach we demonstrate, on the one hand, the ability of our system to perform probabilistic reasoning over multi-modal probability distributions, and on the other hand, the learning of probabilistic logical rules from anchored objects produced by perceptual observations. The learned logical rules are, subsequently, used to assess our proposed probabilistic anchoring procedure. We demonstrate our system in a setting involving object interactions where object occlusions arise and where probabilistic inference is needed to correctly anchor objects.

preprint2015arXiv

Exploring the efficacy of molecular fragments of different complexity in computational SAR modeling

An important first step in computational SAR modeling is to transform the compounds into a representation that can be processed by predictive modeling techniques. This is typically a feature vector where each feature indicates the presence or absence of a molecular fragment. While the traditional approach to SAR modeling employed size restricted fingerprints derived from path fragments, much research in recent years focussed on mining more complex graph based fragments. Today, there seems to be a growing consensus in the data mining community that these more expressive fragments should be more useful. We question this consensus and show experimentally that fragments of low complexity, i.e. sequences, perform better than equally large sets of more complex ones, an effect we explain by pairwise correlation among fragments and the ability of a fragment set to encode compounds from different classes distinctly. The size restriction on these sets is based on ordering the fragments by class-correlation scores. In addition, we also evaluate the effects of using a significance value instead of a length restriction for path fragments and find a significant reduction in the number of features with little loss in performance.

preprint2015arXiv

Lazy Explanation-Based Approximation for Probabilistic Logic Programming

We introduce a lazy approach to the explanation-based approximation of probabilistic logic programs. It uses only the most significant part of the program when searching for explanations. The result is a fast and anytime approximate inference algorithm which returns hard lower and upper bounds on the exact probability. We experimentally show that this method outperforms state-of-the-art approximate inference.

preprint2015arXiv

The Inductive Constraint Programming Loop

Constraint programming is used for a variety of real-world optimisation problems, such as planning, scheduling and resource allocation problems. At the same time, one continuously gathers vast amounts of data about these problems. Current constraint programming software does not exploit such data to update schedules, resources and plans. We propose a new framework, that we call the Inductive Constraint Programming loop. In this approach data is gathered and analyzed systematically, in order to dynamically revise and adapt constraints and optimization criteria. Inductive Constraint Programming aims at bridging the gap between the areas of data mining and machine learning on the one hand, and constraint programming on the other hand.

preprint2014arXiv

High-level Reasoning and Low-level Learning for Grasping: A Probabilistic Logic Pipeline

While grasps must satisfy the grasping stability criteria, good grasps depend on the specific manipulation scenario: the object, its properties and functionalities, as well as the task and grasp constraints. In this paper, we consider such information for robot grasping by leveraging manifolds and symbolic object parts. Specifically, we introduce a new probabilistic logic module to first semantically reason about pre-grasp configurations with respect to the intended tasks. Further, a mapping is learned from part-related visual features to good grasping points. The probabilistic logic module makes use of object-task affordances and object/task ontologies to encode rules that generalize over similar object parts and object/task categories. The use of probabilistic logic for task-dependent grasping contrasts with current approaches that usually learn direct mappings from visual perceptions to task-dependent grasping points. We show the benefits of the full probabilistic logic pipeline experimentally and on a real robot.

preprint2014arXiv

kLog: A Language for Logical and Relational Learning with Kernels

We introduce kLog, a novel approach to statistical relational learning. Unlike standard approaches, kLog does not represent a probability distribution directly. It is rather a language to perform kernel-based learning on expressive logical and relational representations. kLog allows users to specify learning problems declaratively. It builds on simple but powerful concepts: learning from interpretations, entity/relationship data modeling, logic programming, and deductive databases. Access by the kernel to the rich representation is mediated by a technique we call graphicalization: the relational representation is first transformed into a graph --- in particular, a grounded entity/relationship diagram. Subsequently, a choice of graph kernel defines the feature space. kLog supports mixed numerical and symbolic data, as well as background knowledge in the form of Prolog or Datalog programs as in inductive logic programming systems. The kLog framework can be applied to tackle the same range of tasks that has made statistical relational learning so popular, including classification, regression, multitask learning, and collective classification. We also report about empirical comparisons, showing that kLog can be either more accurate, or much faster at the same level of accuracy, than Tilde and Alchemy. kLog is GPLv3 licensed and is available at http://klog.dinfo.unifi.it along with tutorials.

preprint2013arXiv

Inference and learning in probabilistic logic programs using weighted Boolean formulas

Probabilistic logic programs are logic programs in which some of the facts are annotated with probabilities. This paper investigates how classical inference and learning tasks known from the graphical model community can be tackled for probabilistic logic programs. Several such tasks such as computing the marginals given evidence and learning from (partial) interpretations have not really been addressed for probabilistic logic programs before. The first contribution of this paper is a suite of efficient algorithms for various inference tasks. It is based on a conversion of the program and the queries and evidence to a weighted Boolean formula. This allows us to reduce the inference tasks to well-studied tasks such as weighted model counting, which can be solved using state-of-the-art methods known from the graphical model and knowledge compilation literature. The second contribution is an algorithm for parameter estimation in the learning from interpretations setting. The algorithm employs Expectation Maximization, and is built on top of the developed inference algorithms. The proposed approach is experimentally evaluated. The results show that the inference algorithms improve upon the state-of-the-art in probabilistic logic programming and that it is indeed possible to learn the parameters of a probabilistic logic program from interpretations.

preprint2013arXiv

Probabilistic Programming Concepts

A multitude of different probabilistic programming languages exists today, all extending a traditional programming language with primitives to support modeling of complex, structured probability distributions. Each of these languages employs its own probabilistic primitives, and comes with a particular syntax, semantics and inference procedure. This makes it hard to understand the underlying programming concepts and appreciate the differences between the different languages. To obtain a better understanding of probabilistic programming, we identify a number of core programming concepts underlying the primitives used by various probabilistic languages, discuss the execution mechanisms that they require and use these to position state-of-the-art probabilistic languages and their implementation. While doing so, we focus on probabilistic extensions of logic programming languages such as Prolog, which have been developed since more than 20 years.

preprint2012arXiv

Algebraic Model Counting

Weighted model counting (WMC) is a well-known inference task on knowledge bases, used for probabilistic inference in graphical models. We introduce algebraic model counting (AMC), a generalization of WMC to a semiring structure. We show that AMC generalizes many well-known tasks in a variety of domains such as probabilistic inference, soft constraints and network and database analysis. Furthermore, we investigate AMC from a knowledge compilation perspective and show that all AMC tasks can be evaluated using sd-DNNF circuits. We identify further characteristics of AMC instances that allow for the use of even more succinct circuits.

preprint2012arXiv

Inference in Probabilistic Logic Programs using Weighted CNF's

Probabilistic logic programs are logic programs in which some of the facts are annotated with probabilities. Several classical probabilistic inference tasks (such as MAP and computing marginals) have not yet received a lot of attention for this formalism. The contribution of this paper is that we develop efficient inference algorithms for these tasks. This is based on a conversion of the probabilistic logic program and the query and evidence to a weighted CNF formula. This allows us to reduce the inference tasks to well-studied tasks such as weighted model counting. To solve such tasks, we employ state-of-the-art methods. We consider multiple methods for the conversion of the programs as well as for inference on the weighted CNF. The resulting approach is evaluated experimentally and shown to improve upon the state-of-the-art in probabilistic logic programming.

preprint2011arXiv

The Magic of Logical Inference in Probabilistic Programming

Today, many different probabilistic programming languages exist and even more inference mechanisms for these languages. Still, most logic programming based languages use backward reasoning based on SLD resolution for inference. While these methods are typically computationally efficient, they often can neither handle infinite and/or continuous distributions, nor evidence. To overcome these limitations, we introduce distributional clauses, a variation and extension of Sato's distribution semantics. We also contribute a novel approximate inference method that integrates forward reasoning with importance sampling, a well-known technique for probabilistic inference. To achieve efficiency, we integrate two logic programming techniques to direct forward sampling. Magic sets are used to focus on relevant parts of the program, while the integration of backward reasoning allows one to identify and avoid regions of the sample space that are inconsistent with the evidence.

preprint2010arXiv

On the Implementation of the Probabilistic Logic Programming Language ProbLog

The past few years have seen a surge of interest in the field of probabilistic logic learning and statistical relational learning. In this endeavor, many probabilistic logics have been developed. ProbLog is a recent probabilistic extension of Prolog motivated by the mining of large biological networks. In ProbLog, facts can be labeled with probabilities. These facts are treated as mutually independent random variables that indicate whether these facts belong to a randomly sampled program. Different kinds of queries can be posed to ProbLog programs. We introduce algorithms that allow the efficient execution of these queries, discuss their implementation on top of the YAP-Prolog system, and evaluate their performance in the context of large networks of biological entities.