# Neuro-Symbolic Approaches for Context-Aware Human Activity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05058 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05058/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [This Looks Like That: Deep Learning for Interpretable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10574/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Sensor-based Activity Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03502/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: Overview, Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07416/) (2020)
- [Interpretable Deep Learning: Interpretation, Interpretability, Trustworthiness, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10689/) (2021)
- [Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence: Current Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05330/) (2021)
- [Recognizing Detailed Human Context In-the-Wild from Smartphones and Smartwatches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.06354/) (2016)
- [Cross-Subject Transfer Learning in Human Activity Recognition Systems using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12489/) (2019)
- [Semantics of the Black-Box: Can knowledge graphs help make deep learning systems more interpretable and explainable?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08660/) (2020)
- [Context-driven Active and Incremental Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03033/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep Learning models are a standard solution for sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (HAR), but their deployment is often limited by labeled data scarcity and models' opacity. Neuro-Symbolic AI (NeSy) provides an interesting research direction to mitigate these issues by infusing knowledge about context information into HAR deep learning classifiers. However, existing NeSy methods for context-aware HAR require computationally expensive symbolic reasoners during classification, making them less suitable for deployment on resource-constrained devices (e.g., mobile devices). Additionally, NeSy approaches for context-aware HAR have never been evaluated on in-the-wild datasets, and their generalization capabilities in real-world scenarios are questionable. In this work, we propose a novel approach based on a semantic loss function that infuses knowledge constraints in the HAR model during the training phase, avoiding symbolic reasoning during classification. Our results on scripted and in-the-wild datasets show the impact of different semantic loss functions in outperforming a purely data-driven model. We also compare our solution with existing NeSy methods and analyze each approach's strengths and weaknesses. Our semantic loss remains the only NeSy solution that can be deployed as a single DNN without the need for symbolic reasoning modules, reaching recognition rates close (and better in some cases) to existing approaches.