Logic Programs as Declarative and Procedural Bias in Inductive Logic Programming

Machine Learning is necessary for the development of Artificial Intelligence, as pointed out by Turing in his 1950 article ``Computing Machinery and Intelligence''. It is in the same article that Turing suggested the use of computational logic and background knowledge for learning. This thesis follows a logic-based machine learning approach called Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), which is advantageous over other machine learning approaches in terms of relational learning and utilising background knowledge. ILP uses logic programs as a uniform representation for hypothesis, background knowledge and examples, but its declarative bias is usually encoded using metalogical statements. This thesis advocates the use of logic programs to represent declarative and procedural bias, which results in a framework of single-language representation. We show in this thesis that using a logic program called the top theory as declarative bias leads to a sound and complete multi-clause learning system MC-TopLog. It overcomes the entailment-incompleteness of Progol, thus outperforms Progol in terms of predictive accuracies on learning grammars and strategies for playing Nim game. MC-TopLog has been applied to two real-world applications funded by Syngenta, which is an agriculture company. A higher-order extension on top theories results in meta-interpreters, which allow the introduction of new predicate symbols. Thus the resulting ILP system Metagol can do predicate invention, which is an intrinsically higher-order logic operation. Metagol also leverages the procedural semantic of Prolog to encode procedural bias, so that it can outperform both its ASP version and ILP systems without an equivalent procedural bias in terms of efficiency and accuracy. This is demonstrated by the experiments on learning Regular, Context-free and Natural grammars. Metagol is also applied to non-grammar learning tasks involving recursion and predicate invention, such as learning a definition of staircases and robot strategy learning. Both MC-TopLog and Metagol are based on a $\top$-directed framework, which is different from other multi-clause learning systems based on Inverse Entailment, such as CF-Induction, XHAIL and IMPARO. Compared to another $\top$-directed multi-clause learning system TAL, Metagol allows the explicit form of higher-order assumption to be encoded in the form of meta-rules.Open Acces

Inductive Logic Programming as Abductive Search

We present a novel approach to non-monotonic ILP and its implementation called TAL (Top-directed Abductive Learning). TAL overcomes some of the completeness problems of ILP systems based on Inverse Entailment and is the first top-down ILP system that allows background theories and hypotheses to be normal logic programs. The approach relies on mapping an ILP problem into an equivalent ALP one. This enables the use of established ALP proof procedures and the specification of richer language bias with integrity constraints. The mapping provides a principled search space for an ILP problem, over which an abductive search is used to compute inductive solutions

Statistical relational learning of semantic models and grammar rules for 3D building reconstruction from 3D point clouds

Formal grammars are well suited for the estimation of models with an a-priori unknown number of parameters such as buildings and have proven their worth for 3D modeling and reconstruction of cities. However, the generation and design of corresponding grammar rules is a laborious task and relies on expert knowledge. This thesis presents novel approaches for the reduction of this effort using advanced machine learning methods resulting in automatically learned sophisticated grammar rules. Indeed, the learning of a wide range of sophisticated rules, that reflect the variety and complexity, is a challenging task. This is especially the case if a simultaneous machine learning of building structures and the underlying aggregation hierarchies as well as the building parameters and the constraints among them for a semantic interpretation is expected. Thus, in this thesis, an incremental approach is followed. It separates the structure learning from the parameter distribution learning of building parts. Moreover, the so far procedural approaches with formal grammars are mostly rather convenient for the generation of virtual city models than for the reconstruction of existing buildings. To this end, Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) techniques are transferred and applied for the first time in the field of 3D building modeling. This enables the automatic learning of declarative logic programs, which are equivalent to attribute grammars and separate the representation of buildings and their parts from the reconstruction task. A stepwise bottom-up learning, starting from the smallest atomic features of a building part together with the semantic, topological and geometric constraints, is a key to a successful learning of a whole building part. Only few examples are sufficient to learn from precise as well as noisy observations. The learning from uncertain data is realized using probability density functions, decision trees and uncertain projective geometry. This enables the handling and modeling of uncertain topology and geometric reasoning taking noise into consideration. The uncertainty of models itself is also considered. Therefore, a novel method is developed for the learning of Weighted Attribute Context-Free Grammar (WACFG). On the one hand, the structure learning of façades – context-free part of the Grammar – is performed based on annotated derivation trees using specific Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The latter are able to derive probabilistic models from structured data and to predict a most likely tree regarding to given observations. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, Statistical Relational Learning (SRL), especially Markov Logic Networks (MLNs), are applied for the first time in order to learn building part (shape and location) parameters as well as the constraints among these parts. The use of SRL enables to take profit from the elegant logical relational description and to benefit from the efficiency of statistical inference methods. In order to model latent prior knowledge and exploit the architectural regularities of buildings, a novel method is developed for the automatic identification of translational as well as axial symmetries. For symmetry identification a supervised machine learning approach is followed based on an SVM classifier. Building upon the classification results, algorithms are designed for the representation of symmetries using context-free grammars from authoritative building footprints. In all steps the machine learning is performed based on real- world data such as 3D point clouds and building footprints. The handling with uncertainty and occlusions is assured. The presented methods have been successfully applied on real data. The belonging classification and reconstruction results are shown.Statistisches relationales Lernen von semantischen Modellen und Grammatikregeln für 3D Gebäuderekonstruktion aus 3D Punktwolken Formale Grammatiken eignen sich sehr gut zur Schätzung von Modellen mit a-priori unbekannter Anzahl von Parametern und haben sich daher als guter Ansatz zur Rekonstruktion von Städten mittels 3D Stadtmodellen bewährt. Der Entwurf und die Erstellung der dazugehörigen Grammatikregeln benötigt jedoch Expertenwissen und ist mit großem Aufwand verbunden. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurden Verfahren entwickelt, die diesen Aufwand unter Zuhilfenahme von leistungsfähigen Techniken des maschinellen Lernens reduzieren und automatisches Lernen von Regeln ermöglichen. Das Lernen umfangreicher Grammatiken, die die Vielfalt und Komplexität der Gebäude und ihrer Bestandteile widerspiegeln, stellt eine herausfordernde Aufgabe dar. Dies ist insbesondere der Fall, wenn zur semantischen Interpretation sowohl das Lernen der Strukturen und Aggregationshierarchien als auch von Parametern der zu lernenden Objekte gleichzeitig statt finden soll. Aus diesem Grund wird hier ein inkrementeller Ansatz verfolgt, der das Lernen der Strukturen vom Lernen der Parameterverteilungen und Constraints zielführend voneinander trennt. Existierende prozedurale Ansätze mit formalen Grammatiken sind eher zur Generierung von synthetischen Stadtmodellen geeignet, aber nur bedingt zur Rekonstruktion existierender Gebäude nutzbar. Hierfür werden in dieser Schrift Techniken der Induktiven Logischen Programmierung (ILP) zum ersten Mal auf den Bereich der 3D Gebäudemodellierung übertragen. Dies führt zum Lernen deklarativer logischer Programme, die hinsichtlich ihrer Ausdrucksstärke mit attributierten Grammatiken gleichzusetzen sind und die Repräsentation der Gebäude von der Rekonstruktionsaufgabe trennen. Das Lernen von zuerst disaggregierten atomaren Bestandteilen sowie der semantischen, topologischen und geometrischen Beziehungen erwies sich als Schlüssel zum Lernen der Gesamtheit eines Gebäudeteils. Das Lernen erfolgte auf Basis einiger weniger sowohl präziser als auch verrauschter Beispielmodelle. Um das Letztere zu ermöglichen, wurde auf Wahrscheinlichkeitsdichteverteilungen, Entscheidungsbäumen und unsichere projektive Geometrie zurückgegriffen. Dies erlaubte den Umgang mit und die Modellierung von unsicheren topologischen Relationen sowie unscharfer Geometrie. Um die Unsicherheit der Modelle selbst abbilden zu können, wurde ein Verfahren zum Lernen Gewichteter Attributierter Kontextfreier Grammatiken (Weighted Attributed Context-Free Grammars, WACFG) entwickelt. Zum einen erfolgte das Lernen der Struktur von Fassaden –kontextfreier Anteil der Grammatik – aus annotierten Herleitungsbäumen mittels spezifischer Support Vektor Maschinen (SVMs), die in der Lage sind, probabilistische Modelle aus strukturierten Daten abzuleiten und zu prädizieren. Zum anderen wurden nach meinem besten Wissen Methoden des statistischen relationalen Lernens (SRL), insbesondere Markov Logic Networks (MLNs), erstmalig zum Lernen von Parametern von Gebäuden sowie von bestehenden Relationen und Constraints zwischen ihren Bestandteilen eingesetzt. Das Nutzen von SRL erlaubt es, die eleganten relationalen Beschreibungen der Logik mit effizienten Methoden der statistischen Inferenz zu verbinden. Um latentes Vorwissen zu modellieren und architekturelle Regelmäßigkeiten auszunutzen, ist ein Verfahren zur automatischen Erkennung von Translations- und Spiegelsymmetrien und deren Repräsentation mittels kontextfreier Grammatiken entwickelt worden. Hierfür wurde mittels überwachtem Lernen ein SVM-Klassifikator entwickelt und implementiert. Basierend darauf wurden Algorithmen zur Induktion von Grammatikregeln aus Grundrissdaten entworfen

Meta-interpretive learning of higher-order dyadic datalog: predicate invention revisited

Since the late 1990s predicate invention has been under-explored within inductive logic programming due to difficulties in formulating efficient search mechanisms. However, a recent paper demonstrated that both predicate invention and the learning of recursion can be efficiently implemented for regular and context-free grammars, by way of metalogical substitutions with respect to a modified Prolog meta-interpreter which acts as the learning engine. New predicate symbols are introduced as constants representing existentially quantified higher-order variables. The approach demonstrates that predicate invention can be treated as a form of higher-order logical reasoning. In this paper we generalise the approach of meta-interpretive learning (MIL) to that of learning higher-order dyadic datalog programs. We show that with an infinite signature the higher-order dyadic datalog class H2 2 has universal Turing expressivity though H2 2 is decidable given a finite signature. Additionally we show that Knuth–Bendix ordering of the hypothesis space together with logarithmic clause bounding allows our MIL implementation MetagolD to PAC-learn minimal cardinality H2 2 definitions. This result is consistent with our experiments which indicate that MetagolD efficiently learns compact H2 2 definitions involving predicate invention for learning robotic strategies, the East–West train challenge and NELL. Additionally higher-order concepts were learned in the NELL language learning domain. The Metagol code and datasets described in this paper have been made publicly available on a website to allow reproduction of results in this paper

Efficient Learning and Evaluation of Complex Concepts in Inductive Logic Programming

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a subfield of Machine Learning with foundations in logic programming. In ILP, logic programming, a subset of first-order logic, is used as a uniform representation language for the problem specification and induced theories. ILP has been successfully applied to many real-world problems, especially in the biological domain (e.g. drug design, protein structure prediction), where relational information is of particular importance. The expressiveness of logic programs grants flexibility in specifying the learning task and understandability to the induced theories. However, this flexibility comes at a high computational cost, constraining the applicability of ILP systems. Constructing and evaluating complex concepts remain two of the main issues that prevent ILP systems from tackling many learning problems. These learning problems are interesting both from a research perspective, as they raise the standards for ILP systems, and from an application perspective, where these target concepts naturally occur in many real-world applications. Such complex concepts cannot be constructed or evaluated by parallelizing existing top-down ILP systems or improving the underlying Prolog engine. Novel search strategies and cover algorithms are needed. The main focus of this thesis is on how to efficiently construct and evaluate complex hypotheses in an ILP setting. In order to construct such hypotheses we investigate two approaches. The first, the Top Directed Hypothesis Derivation framework, implemented in the ILP system TopLog, involves the use of a top theory to constrain the hypothesis space. In the second approach we revisit the bottom-up search strategy of Golem, lifting its restriction on determinate clauses which had rendered Golem inapplicable to many key areas. These developments led to the bottom-up ILP system ProGolem. A challenge that arises with a bottom-up approach is the coverage computation of long, non-determinate, clauses. Prolog’s SLD-resolution is no longer adequate. We developed a new, Prolog-based, theta-subsumption engine which is significantly more efficient than SLD-resolution in computing the coverage of such complex clauses. We provide evidence that ProGolem achieves the goal of learning complex concepts by presenting a protein-hexose binding prediction application. The theory ProGolem induced has a statistically significant better predictive accuracy than that of other learners. More importantly, the biological insights ProGolem’s theory provided were judged by domain experts to be relevant and, in some cases, novel

A sequence-length sensitive approach to learning biological grammars using inductive logic programming.

This thesis aims to investigate if the ideas behind compression principles, such as the Minimum Description Length, can help us to improve the process of learning biological grammars from protein sequences using Inductive Logic Programming (ILP). Contrary to most traditional ILP learning problems, biological sequences often have a high variation in their length. This variation in length is an important feature of biological sequences which should not be ignored by ILP systems. However we have identified that some ILP systems do not take into account the length of examples when evaluating their proposed hypotheses. During the learning process, many ILP systems use clause evaluation functions to assign a score to induced hypotheses, estimating their quality and effectively influencing the search. Traditionally, clause evaluation functions do not take into account the length of the examples which are covered by the clause. We propose L-modification, a way of modifying existing clause evaluation functions so that they take into account the length of the examples which they learn from. An empirical study was undertaken to investigate if significant improvements can be achieved by applying L-modification to a standard clause evaluation function. Furthermore, we generally investigated how ILP systems cope with the length of examples in training data. We show that our L-modified clause evaluation function outperforms our benchmark function in every experiment we conducted and thus we prove that L-modification is a useful concept. We also show that the length of the examples in the training data used by ILP systems does have an undeniable impact on the results

Object-oriented data mining

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Inductive logic programming at 30: a new introduction

Inductive logic programming (ILP) is a form of machine learning. The goal of ILP is to induce a hypothesis (a set of logical rules) that generalises training examples. As ILP turns 30, we provide a new introduction to the field. We introduce the necessary logical notation and the main learning settings; describe the building blocks of an ILP system; compare several systems on several dimensions; describe four systems (Aleph, TILDE, ASPAL, and Metagol); highlight key application areas; and, finally, summarise current limitations and directions for future research.Comment: Paper under revie

Learning relational event models from video

Event models obtained automatically from video can be used in applications ranging from abnormal event detection to content based video retrieval. When multiple agents are involved in the events, characterizing events naturally suggests encoding interactions as relations. Learning event models from this kind of relational spatio-temporal data using relational learning techniques such as Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) hold promise, but have not been successfully applied to very large datasets which result from video data. In this paper, we present a novel framework REMIND (Relational Event Model INDuction) for supervised relational learning of event models from large video datasets using ILP. Efficiency is achieved through the learning from interpretations setting and using a typing system that exploits the type hierarchy of objects in a domain. The use of types also helps prevent over generalization. Furthermore, we also present a type-refining operator and prove that it is optimal. The learned models can be used for recognizing events from previously unseen videos. We also present an extension to the framework by integrating an abduction step that improves the learning performance when there is noise in the input data. The experimental results on several hours of video data from two challenging real world domains (an airport domain and a physical action verbs domain) suggest that the techniques are suitable to real world scenarios