# A Neurosymbolic Framework for Bias Correction in Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15886 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15886/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [Recognize Anything: A Strong Image Tagging Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03514/) (2023)
- [Object Detectors Emerge in Deep Scene CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6856/) (2014)
- [A Convex Framework for Fair Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02409/) (2017)
- [Analysis of Explainers of Black Box Deep Neural Networks for Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12116/) (2019)
- [Bias in Machine Learning Software: Why? How? What to do?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12195/) (2021)
- [Satisfying Real-world Goals with Dataset Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07558/) (2016)
- [Interpreting CNN Knowledge via an Explanatory Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01785/) (2017)
- [Neural Network Robustness as a Verification Property: A Principled Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01396/) (2021)
- [Examining CNN Representations with respect to Dataset Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10577/) (2017)
- [FOLD-SE: An Efficient Rule-based Machine Learning Algorithm with Scalable Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07912/) (2022)
- [Logic of Differentiable Logics: Towards a Uniform Semantics of DL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10650/) (2023)
- [Vehicle: Bridging the Embedding Gap in the Verification of Neuro-Symbolic Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06379/) (2024)
- [Growing Interpretable Part Graphs on ConvNets via Multi-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04246/) (2016)
- [Self-Correcting Neural Networks For Safe Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11445/) (2021)
- [Using Logic Programming and Kernel-Grouping for Improving Interpretability of Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13073/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent efforts in interpreting Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) focus on translating the activation of CNN filters into a stratified Answer Set Program (ASP) rule-sets. The CNN filters are known to capture high-level image concepts, thus the predicates in the rule-set are mapped to the concept that their corresponding filter represents. Hence, the rule-set exemplifies the decision-making process of the CNN w.r.t the concepts that it learns for any image classification task. These rule-sets help understand the biases in CNNs, although correcting the biases remains a challenge. We introduce a neurosymbolic framework called NeSyBiCor for bias correction in a trained CNN. Given symbolic concepts, as ASP constraints, that the CNN is biased towards, we convert the concepts to their corresponding vector representations. Then, the CNN is retrained using our novel semantic similarity loss that pushes the filters away from (or towards) learning the desired/undesired concepts. The final ASP rule-set obtained after retraining, satisfies the constraints to a high degree, thus showing the revision in the knowledge of the CNN. We demonstrate that our NeSyBiCor framework successfully corrects the biases of CNNs trained with subsets of classes from the "Places" dataset while sacrificing minimal accuracy and improving interpretability.
