Human ability at solving complex tasks is helped by priors on object and event semantics of their environment. This paper investigates the use of similar prior knowledge for transfer learning in Reinforcement Learning agents. In particular, the paper proposes to use a first-order-logic language grounded in deep neural networks to represent facts about objects and their semantics in the real world. Facts are provided as background knowledge a priori to learning a policy for how to act in the world. The priors are injected with the conventional input in a single agent architecture. As proof-of-concept, the paper tests the system in simple experiments that show the importance of symbolic abstraction and flexible fact derivation. The paper shows that the proposed system can learn to take advantage of both the symbolic layer and the image layer in a single decision selection module.
How to combine such systems effectively has led recently to new work on how to use traditional symbolic knowledge representations in Reinforcement Learning. For instance, some recent work introduces symbolic front ends on top of neural back ends @cite_3 . The neural back-end is responsible of conceptual abstraction from the image and maps the raw input to symbolic representations. A symbolic layer then represents information in separate streams for each symbol, before a decision module aggregates them using heuristics. Others have tried to add common sense priors in the heuristic aggregation @cite_11 . The system presented in this paper integrates different sources of information in a single representation before a DRL algorithm can learn to make choices using either symbolic information or raw pixel data.
@cite_3 @cite_11
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We introduce neural networks for end-to-end differentiable proving of queries to knowledge bases by operating on dense vector representations of symbols. These neural networks are constructed recursively by taking inspiration from the backward chaining algorithm as used in Prolog. Specifically, we replace symbolic unification with a differentiable computation on vector representations of symbols using a radial basis function kernel, thereby combining symbolic reasoning with learning subsymbolic vector representations. By using gradient descent, the resulting neural network can be trained to infer facts from a given incomplete knowledge base. It learns to (i) place representations of similar symbols in close proximity in a vector space, (ii) make use of such similarities to prove queries, (iii) induce logical rules, and (iv) use provided and induced logical rules for multi-hop reasoning. We demonstrate that this architecture outperforms ComplEx, a state-of-the-art neural link prediction model, on three out of four benchmark knowledge bases while at the same time inducing interpretable function-free first-order logic rules. We marry two powerful ideas: deep representation learning for visual recognition and language understanding, and symbolic program execution for reasoning. Our neural-symbolic visual question answering (NS-VQA) system first recovers a structural scene representation from the image and a program trace from the question. It then executes the program on the scene representation to obtain an answer. Incorporating symbolic structure as prior knowledge offers three unique advantages. First, executing programs on a symbolic space is more robust to long program traces; our model can solve complex reasoning tasks better, achieving an accuracy of 99.8 on the CLEVR dataset. Second, the model is more data- and memory-efficient: it performs well after learning on a small number of training data; it can also encode an image into a compact representation, requiring less storage than existing methods for offline question answering. Third, symbolic program execution offers full transparency to the reasoning process; we are thus able to interpret and diagnose each execution step. The effective integration of learning and reasoning is a well-known and challenging area of research within artificial intelligence. Neural-symbolic systems seek to integrate learning and reasoning by combining neural networks and symbolic knowledge representation. In this paper, a novel methodology is proposed for the extraction of relational knowledge from neural networks which are trainable by the efficient application of the backpropagation learning algorithm. First-order logic rules are extracted from the neural networks, offering interpretable symbolic relational models on which logical reasoning can be performed. The wellknown knowledge extraction algorithm TREPAN was adapted and incorporated into the first-order version of the neural-symbolic system CILP++. Empirical results obtained in comparison with a probabilistic model for relational learning, Markov Logic Networks, and a state-of-the-art Inductive Logic Programming system, Aleph, indicate that the proposed methodology achieves competitive accuracy results consistently in all datasets investigated, while either Markov Logic Networks or Aleph show considerably worse results in at least one dataset. It is expected that effective knowledge extraction from neural networks can contribute to the integration of heterogeneous knowledge representations. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has gained great success by learning directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs, yet is notorious for the lack of interpretability. Interpretability of the subtasks is critical in hierarchical decision-making as it increases the transparency of black-box-style DRL approach and helps the RL practitioners to understand the high-level behavior of the system better. In this paper, we introduce symbolic planning into DRL and propose a framework of Symbolic Deep Reinforcement Learning (SDRL) that can handle both high-dimensional sensory inputs and symbolic planning. The task-level interpretability is enabled by relating symbolic actions to options.This framework features a planner -- controller -- meta-controller architecture, which takes charge of subtask scheduling, data-driven subtask learning, and subtask evaluation, respectively. The three components cross-fertilize each other and eventually converge to an optimal symbolic plan along with the learned subtasks, bringing together the advantages of long-term planning capability with symbolic knowledge and end-to-end reinforcement learning directly from a high-dimensional sensory input. Experimental results validate the interpretability of subtasks, along with improved data efficiency compared with state-of-the-art approaches.