Generating by Understanding: Neural Visual Generation with Logical Symbol Groundings

Despite the great success of neural visual generative models in recent years, integrating them with strong symbolic knowledge reasoning systems remains a challenging task. The main challenges are two-fold: one is symbol assignment, i.e. bonding latent factors of neural visual generators with meaningful symbols from knowledge reasoning systems. Another is rule learning, i.e. learning new rules, which govern the generative process of the data, to augment the knowledge reasoning systems. To deal with these symbol grounding problems, we propose a neural-symbolic learning approach, Abductive Visual Generation (AbdGen), for integrating logic programming systems with neural visual generative models based on the abductive learning framework. To achieve reliable and efficient symbol assignment, the quantized abduction method is introduced for generating abduction proposals by the nearest-neighbor lookups within semantic codebooks. To achieve precise rule learning, the contrastive meta-abduction method is proposed to eliminate wrong rules with positive cases and avoid less-informative rules with negative cases simultaneously. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets show that compared to the baselines, AbdGen requires significantly fewer instance-level labeling information for symbol assignment. Furthermore, our approach can effectively learn underlying logical generative rules from data, which is out of the capability of existing approaches.