NeSyA: Neurosymbolic Automata

NeSyA: Neurosymbolic Automata

Nikolaos Manginas, George Paliouras, Luc De Raedt

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 5950-5958. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/662

Neurosymbolic (NeSy) AI has emerged as a promising direction to integrate neural and symbolic reasoning. Unfortunately, little effort has been given to developing NeSy systems tailored to sequential/temporal problems. We identify symbolic automata (which combine the power of automata for temporal reasoning with that of propositional logic for static reasoning) as a suitable formalism for expressing knowledge in temporal domains. Focusing on the task of sequence classification and tagging we show that symbolic automata can be integrated with neural-based perception, under probabilistic semantics towards an end-to-end differentiable model. Our proposed hybrid model, termed NeSyA (Neuro Symbolic Automata) is shown to either scale or perform more accurately than previous NeSy systems in a synthetic benchmark and to provide benefits in terms of generalization compared to purely neural systems in a real-world event recognition task. Code is available at: https://github.com/nmanginas/nesya
Keywords:
Machine Learning: ML: Neuro-symbolic methods/Abductive Learning
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Learning and reasoning