Statistical relational AI (StarAI) aims at reasoning and learning in noisy domains described in terms of objects and relationships by combining probability with first-order logic. With huge advances in deep learning in the current years, combining deep networks with first-order logic has been the focus of several recent studies. Many of the existing attempts, however, only focus on relations and ignore object properties. The attempts that do consider object properties are limited in terms of modelling power or scalability. In this paper, we develop relational neural networks (RelNNs) by adding hidden layers to relational logistic regression (the relational counterpart of logistic regression). We learn latent properties for objects both directly and through general rules. Back-propagation is used for training these models. A modular, layer-wise architecture facilitates utilizing the techniques developed within deep learning community to our architecture. Initial experiments on eight tasks over three real-world datasets show that RelNNs are promising models for relational learning.
A new method is proposed for compiling causal independencies into Markov logic networks (MLNs). An MLN can be viewed as compactly representing a factorization of a joint probability into the product of a set of factors guided by logical formulas. We present a notion of causal independence that enables one to further factorize the factors into a combination of even smaller factors and consequently obtain a finer-grain factorization of the joint probability. The causal independence lets us specify the factor in terms of weighted, directed clauses and operators, such as "or", "sum" or "max", on the contribution of the variables involved in the factors, hence combining both undirected and directed knowledge. Our experimental evaluations shows that making use of the finer-grain factorization provided by causal independence can improve quality of parameter learning in MLNs. First order probabilistic logics combine a first order logic with a probabilistic knowledge representation. In this context, we introduce continuous Bayesian logic programs, which extend the recently introduced Bayesian logic programs to deal with continuous random variables. Bayesian logic programs tightly integrate definite logic programs with Bayesian networks. The resulting framework nicely seperates the qualitative (i.e. logical) component from the quantitative (i.e. the probabilistic) one. We also show how the quantitative component can be learned using a gradient-based maximum likelihood method.