Deep Rule Learning

Description

Arguably the key reason for the success of deep neural networks is their ability to autonomously form non-linear combinations of the input features, which can be used in subsequent layers of the network. The analogon to this capability in inductive rule learning is to learn a structured rule base, where the inputs are combined to learn new auxiliary concepts, which can then be used as inputs by subsequent rules. While it is clear that this is sufficient from a logical point of view because every logical expression can be reduced to an equivalent DNF expression, it could nevertheless be the case that more structured representations, which form deep theories by forming intermediate concepts, could be easier to learn, in very much the same way as deep neural networks are able to outperform shallow networks, even though the latter are also universal function approximators. However, there are several non-trivial obstacles that need to be overcome before a sufficiently powerful deep rule learning algorithm could be developed and be compared to the state-of-the-art in inductive rule learning. In this talk, we want to draw attention to this unsolved problem, and show some preliminary results where, for the lack of a powerful deep rule learning algorithm, we empirically compare deep and shallow rule sets that have been optimized with a uniform general mini-batch based optimization algorithm. In our experiments on both artificial and real-world benchmark data, deep rule networks outperformed their shallow counterparts, which we take as an indication that it is worthwhile to devote more efforts to learning deep rule structures from data.

Period	27 Oct 2021
Event title	RuleML webinar
Event type	Other
Location	AustriaShow on map