Spectral Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning II: Semantic Node Merging, Entailment Filtering, and Knowledge Graph Alignment

This report extends the Spectral Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning (Spectral NSR) framework by introducing three semantically grounded enhancements: (1) transformer-based node merging using contextual embeddings (e.g., Sentence-BERT, SimCSE) to reduce redundancy, (2) sentence-level entailment validation with pretrained NLI classifiers (e.g., RoBERTa, DeBERTa) to improve edge quality, and (3) alignment with external knowledge graphs (e.g., ConceptNet, Wikidata) to augment missing context. These modifications enhance graph fidelity while preserving the core spectral reasoning pipeline. Experimental results on ProofWriter, EntailmentBank, and CLUTRR benchmarks show consistent accuracy gains (up to +3.8%), improved generalization to adversarial cases, and reduced inference noise. The novelty lies in performing semantic and symbolic refinement entirely upstream of the spectral inference stage, enabling efficient, interpretable, and scalable reasoning without relying on quadratic attention mechanisms. In summary, this work extends the Spectral NSR framework with modular, semantically grounded preprocessing steps that improve graph quality without altering the core spectral reasoning engine. The result is a more robust, interpretable, and scalable reasoning system suitable for deployment in open-domain and real-world settings.