Unsupervised Learning of Neurosymbolic Encoders
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Abstract (arXiv)
We present a framework for the unsupervised learning of neurosymbolic encoders, which are encoders obtained by composing neural networks with symbolic programs from a domain-specific language. Our framework naturally incorporates symbolic expert knowledge into the learning process, which leads to more interpretable and factorized latent representations compared to fully neural encoders. We integrate modern program synthesis techniques with the variational autoencoding (VAE) framework, in order to learn a neurosymbolic encoder in conjunction with a standard decoder. The programmatic descriptions from our encoders can benefit many analysis workflows, such as in behavior modeling where interpreting agent actions and movements is important. We evaluate our method on learning latent representations for real-world trajectory data from animal biology and sports analytics. We show that our approach offers significantly better separation of meaningful categories than standard VAEs and leads to practical gains on downstream analysis tasks, such as for behavior classification.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 45 of its 79 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2021.
Builds on
45 of 79 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 4; 2023: 1; 2024: 0; 2025: 1; 2026: 2.
8 papers.
- 2025Neuro-Symbolic AI in 2024: A Systematic Reviewcited by 38
- 2023Neurosymbolic Grounding for Compositional World Modelscited by 14
- 2022MABe22: A Multi-Species Multi-Task Benchmark for Learned Representations of Behaviorcited by 12
- 2022Neuro-Symbolic Learning: Principles and Applications in Ophthalmologycited by 7
- 2022Neurosymbolic Programming for Sciencecited by 7
- 2022Open-Source Tools for Behavioral Video Analysis: Setup, Methods, and Developmentcited by 4
- 2026Differentiable Rule Induction from Raw Sequence Inputscited by 2
- 2026Grounding vs. Compositionality: On the Non-Complementarity of Reasoning in Neuro-Symbolic Systemscited by 0
- 2026Grounding vs. Compositionality: On the Non-Complementarity of Reasoning in Neuro-Symbolic Systems29 Apr 2026
- 2026Differentiable Rule Induction from Raw Sequence Inputs14 Feb 2026
- 2025Neuro-Symbolic AI in 2024: A Systematic Review9 Jan 2025
- 2023Neurosymbolic Grounding for Compositional World Models19 Oct 2023
- 2022Neurosymbolic Programming for Science10 Oct 2022
- 2022Neuro-Symbolic Learning: Principles and Applications in Ophthalmology31 Jul 2022
- 2022MABe22: A Multi-Species Multi-Task Benchmark for Learned Representations of Behavior21 Jul 2022
- 2022Open-Source Tools for Behavioral Video Analysis: Setup, Methods, and Development6 Apr 2022