Abstract:Pretrained language models (PLMs) like BERT provide strong semantic representations but are costly and opaque, while symbolic models such as the Tsetlin Machine (TM) offer transparency but lack semantic generalization. We propose a semantic bootstrapping framework that transfers LLM knowledge into symbolic form, combining interpretability with semantic capacity. Given a class label, an LLM generates sub-intents that guide synthetic data creation through a three-stage curriculum (seed, core, enriched), expanding semantic diversity. A Non-Negated TM (NTM) learns from these examples to extract high-confidence literals as interpretable semantic cues. Injecting these cues into real data enables a TM to align clause logic with LLM-inferred semantics. Our method requires no embeddings or runtime LLM calls, yet equips symbolic models with pretrained semantic priors. Across multiple text classification tasks, it improves interpretability and accuracy over vanilla TM, achieving performance comparable to BERT while remaining fully symbolic and efficient.
Abstract:Accurate traffic forecasting is vital to intelligent transportation systems, which are widely adopted to solve urban traffic issues. Existing traffic forecasting studies focus on modeling spatial-temporal dynamics in traffic data, among which the graph convolution network (GCN) is at the center for exploiting the spatial dependency embedded in the road network graphs. However, these GCN-based methods operate intrinsically on the node level (e.g., road and intersection) only whereas overlooking the spatial hierarchy of the whole city. Nodes such as intersections and road segments can form clusters (e.g., regions), which could also have interactions with each other and share similarities at a higher level. In this work, we propose an Adaptive Hierarchical SpatioTemporal Network (AHSTN) to promote traffic forecasting by exploiting the spatial hierarchy and modeling multi-scale spatial correlations. Apart from the node-level spatiotemporal blocks, AHSTN introduces the adaptive spatiotemporal downsampling module to infer the spatial hierarchy for spatiotemporal modeling at the cluster level. Then, an adaptive spatiotemporal upsampling module is proposed to upsample the cluster-level representations to the node-level and obtain the multi-scale representations for generating predictions. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that AHSTN achieves better performance over several strong baselines.