A Deep Reinforcement Learning based Approach to Learning Transferable Proof Guidance Strategies

Traditional first-order logic (FOL) reasoning systems usually rely on manual heuristics for proof guidance. We propose TRAIL: a system that learns to perform proof guidance using reinforcement learning. A key design principle of our system is that it is general enough to allow transfer to problems in different domains that do not share the same vocabulary of the training set. To do so, we developed a novel representation of the internal state of a prover in terms of clauses and inference actions, and a novel neural-based attention mechanism to learn interactions between clauses. We demonstrate that this approach enables the system to generalize from training to test data across domains with different vocabularies, suggesting that the neural architecture in TRAIL is well suited for representing and processing of logical formalisms.

Voting with Random Classifiers (VORACE)

In many machine learning scenarios, looking for the best classifier that fits a particular dataset can be very costly in terms of time and resources. Moreover, it can require deep knowledge of the specific domain. We propose a new technique which does not require profound expertise in the domain and avoids the commonly used strategy of hyper-parameter tuning and model selection. Our method is an innovative ensemble technique that uses voting rules over a set of randomly-generated classifiers. Given a new input sample, we interpret the output of each classifier as a ranking over the set of possible classes. We then aggregate these output rankings using a voting rule, which treats them as preferences over the classes. We show that our approach obtains good results compared to the state-of-the-art, both providing a theoretical analysis and an empirical evaluation of the approach on several datasets.

RuDaS: Synthetic Datasets for Rule Learning and Evaluation Tools

Logical rules are a popular knowledge representation language in many domains, representing background knowledge and encoding information that can be derived from given facts in a compact form. However, rule formulation is a complex process that requires deep domain expertise, and is further challenged by today's often large, heterogeneous, and incomplete knowledge graphs. Several approaches for learning rules automatically, given a set of input example facts, have been proposed over time, including, more recently, neural systems. Yet, the area is missing adequate datasets and evaluation approaches: existing datasets often resemble toy examples that neither cover the various kinds of dependencies between rules nor allow for testing scalability. We present a tool for generating different kinds of datasets and for evaluating rule learning systems.

Using deceased-donor kidneys to initiate chains of living donor kidney paired donations: algorithms and experimentation

We design a flexible algorithm that exploits deceased donor kidneys to initiate chains of living donor kidney paired donations, combining deceased and living donor allocation mechanisms to improve the quantity and quality of kidney transplants. The advantages of this approach have been measured using retrospective data on the pool of donor/recipient incompatible and desensitized pairs at the Padua University Hospital, the largest center for living donor kidney transplants in Italy. The experiments show a remarkable improvement on the number of patients with incompatible donor who could be transplanted, a decrease in the number of desensitization procedures, and an increase in the number of UT patients (that is, patients unlikely to be transplanted for immunological reasons) in the waiting list who could receive an organ.

Logical Conditional Preference Theories

CP-nets represent the dominant existing framework for expressing qualitative conditional preferences between alternatives, and are used in a variety of areas including constraint solving. Over the last fifteen years, a significant literature has developed exploring semantics, algorithms, implementation and use of CP-nets. This paper introduces a comprehensive new framework for conditional preferences: logical conditional preference theories (LCP theories). To express preferences, the user specifies arbitrary (constraint) Datalog programs over a binary ordering relation on outcomes. We show how LCP theories unify and generalize existing conditional preference proposals, and leverage the rich semantic, algorithmic and implementation frameworks of Datalog.