# SNeL: A Structured Neuro-Symbolic Language for Entity-Based Multimodal Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06036 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06036/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [Neural Probabilistic Logic Programming in DeepProbLog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08194/) (2019)
- [The Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner: Interpreting Scenes, Words, and Sentences From Natural Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12584/) (2019)
- [ImageBERT: Cross-modal Pre-training with Large-scale Weak-supervised Image-Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07966/) (2020)
- [Logical Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13155/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Audio Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00078/) (2019)
- [Text Segmentation as a Supervised Learning Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09337/) (2018)
- [Sound Event Detection: A Tutorial](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05463/) (2021)
- [On Metric Learning for Audio-Text Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15537/) (2022)
- [Toward Fast and Accurate Neural Discourse Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09147/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, multimodal and Neuro-Symbolic paradigms stand at the forefront, with a particular emphasis on the identification and interaction with entities and their relations across diverse modalities. Addressing the need for complex querying and interaction in this context, we introduce SNeL (Structured Neuro-symbolic Language), a versatile query language designed to facilitate nuanced interactions with neural networks processing multimodal data. SNeL's expressive interface enables the construction of intricate queries, supporting logical and arithmetic operators, comparators, nesting, and more. This allows users to target specific entities, specify their properties, and limit results, thereby efficiently extracting information from a scene. By aligning high-level symbolic reasoning with low-level neural processing, SNeL effectively bridges the Neuro-Symbolic divide. The language's versatility extends to a variety of data types, including images, audio, and text, making it a powerful tool for multimodal scene understanding. Our evaluations demonstrate SNeL's potential to reshape the way we interact with complex neural networks, underscoring its efficacy in driving targeted information extraction and facilitating a deeper understanding of the rich semantics encapsulated in multimodal AI models.