pix2rule: End-to-end Neuro-symbolic Rule Learning
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Abstract (arXiv)
Humans have the ability to seamlessly combine low-level visual input with high-level symbolic reasoning often in the form of recognising objects, learning relations between them and applying rules. Neuro-symbolic systems aim to bring a unifying approach to connectionist and logic-based principles for visual processing and abstract reasoning respectively. This paper presents a complete neuro-symbolic method for processing images into objects, learning relations and logical rules in an end-to-end fashion. The main contribution is a differentiable layer in a deep learning architecture from which symbolic relations and rules can be extracted by pruning and thresholding. We evaluate our model using two datasets: subgraph isomorphism task for symbolic rule learning and an image classification domain with compound relations for learning objects, relations and rules. We demonstrate that our model scales beyond state-of-the-art symbolic learners and outperforms deep relational neural network architectures.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 41 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2021.
Builds on
41 of 76 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 3; 2025: 4.
9 papers.
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- 2024Neuro-Symbolic AI: Explainability, Challenges, and Future Trendscited by 10
- 2023Neuro-symbolic Rule Learning in Real-world Classification Taskscited by 7
- 2025Neural DNF-MT: A Neuro-symbolic Approach for Learning Interpretable and Editable Policiescited by 4
- 2023Learning Type-Generalized Actions for Symbolic Planningcited by 2
- 2025Neural Logic Networks for Interpretable Classificationcited by 2
- 2024Bridging the Gap: Representation Spaces in Neuro-Symbolic AIcited by 0
- 2025Disentangling Neural Disjunctive Normal Form Modelscited by 0
- 2025Neural Logic Networks for Interpretable Classification11 Aug 2025
- 2025Disentangling Neural Disjunctive Normal Form Models14 Jul 2025
- 2025Neuro-Symbolic AI in 2024: A Systematic Review9 Jan 2025
- 2025Neural DNF-MT: A Neuro-symbolic Approach for Learning Interpretable and Editable Policies7 Jan 2025
- 2024Bridging the Gap: Representation Spaces in Neuro-Symbolic AI7 Nov 2024
- 2024Neuro-Symbolic AI: Explainability, Challenges, and Future Trends7 Nov 2024
- 2024TELLER: A Trustworthy Framework for Explainable, Generalizable and Controllable Fake News Detection12 Feb 2024
- 2023Learning Type-Generalized Actions for Symbolic Planning9 Aug 2023
- 2023Neuro-symbolic Rule Learning in Real-world Classification Tasks29 Mar 2023