Analyzing differentiable fuzzy logic operators

DOI10.1016/J.ARTINT.2021.103602MaRDI QIDQ2060729zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Emile van Krieken, Erman Acar, Frank van Harmelen

Publication date 13 December 2021

Published in Artificial Intelligence (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06100

zbMATH Keywords

fuzzy implication fuzzy logic learning with constraints neural-symbolic AI

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Fuzzy logic; logic of vagueness (03B52) Learning and adaptive systems in artificial intelligence (68T05) Logic in artificial intelligence (68T27) Reasoning under uncertainty in the context of artificial intelligence (68T37)

Abstract: The AI community is increasingly putting its attention towards combining symbolic and neural approaches, as it is often argued that the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are complementary. One recent trend in the literature are weakly supervised learning techniques that employ operators from fuzzy logics. In particular, these use prior background knowledge described in such logics to help the training of a neural network from unlabeled and noisy data. By interpreting logical symbols using neural networks, this background knowledge can be added to regular loss functions, hence making reasoning a part of learning. We study, both formally and empirically, how a large collection of logical operators from the fuzzy logic literature behave in a differentiable learning setting. We find that many of these operators, including some of the most well-known, are highly unsuitable in this setting. A further finding concerns the treatment of implication in these fuzzy logics, and shows a strong imbalance between gradients driven by the antecedent and the consequent of the implication. Furthermore, we introduce a new family of fuzzy implications (called sigmoidal implications) to tackle this phenomenon. Finally, we empirically show that it is possible to use Differentiable Fuzzy Logics for semi-supervised learning, and compare how different operators behave in practice. We find that, to achieve the largest performance improvement over a supervised baseline, we have to resort to non-standard combinations of logical operators which perform well in learning, but no longer satisfy the usual logical laws.

Review text

The main aim of this paper is to propose an approach that integrates machine learning with symbolically expressed backgrond knowledge in the form of formulae of fuzzy logic. To this purpose, the authors analyze a large class of fuzzy logic operators (conjunctions, disjunctions, implications, and aggregations) from the point of view of their differentiability. The importance of this aspect becomes clear if we consider machine learning scenarios where, e.g., partial derivatives equal to zero on large portions of domains of these operators mean a loss of potentially useful information. The authors introduce \emph{Differentiable Fuzzy Logics} with semantics using vector embeddings. This means that objects in the domain are vectors of reals. Predicates are interpreted as functions that map these vectors to truth values from the interval \([0, 1]\). Based on this semantics, the fuzzy maximum satisfiability problem is considered. If all operators are differentiable, this problem can be solved using gradient descent. Particular attention is paid to fuzzy implications, since a significant proportion of background knowledge is expressed using implications. The product S-implication (known also as Rechenbach implication) \(I_\mathrm{RC}(a, c) = 1 - a + a\cdot c\) possesses favorable derivatives; however, there are several problems, in particular the behavior around \(a = 0 = c\). The authors tackle this problem by introducing a new class of implication operators called \emph{sigmoidal implications}. These are transformations of other fuzzy implications using the sigmoid function in such a way that the boundary conditions hold. The paper also contains a description of a series of experiments addressing a problem of semi-supervised learning using the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits. The results of these experiments can provide guidelines for choosing fuzzy logic operators in machine learning scenarios. The best results have been obtained for operators abandoning the normal symmetric configurations of these operators.

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