Soft Symbol Grounding for Prototypical Concepts

Neuro-symbolic models are usually trained with supervision only on final labels, leaving the intermediate concepts unobserved. Since many concept assignments are consistent with a given label, training can predict labels correctly while recovering the wrong concepts, a failure known as a reasoning shortcut. Prototypical networks reduce shortcuts by anchoring each concept to a few labeled examples, but existing methods still couple perception and reasoning through a hand-crafted, task-specific differentiable loss that must be redesigned for every task. We introduce Soft-PNet, which removes this loss: it reframes concept grounding as a Metropolis walk over a precomputed cache of feasible symbolic solutions, guided by a prototype distribution built from a single labeled anchor per concept, and trains against one KL objective between the prototype-weighted cache and the network's concept predictions. The objective is identical across tasks and remains applicable when the solution space cannot be enumerated. On textttMNIST-EvenOdd, Visual Sudoku, and textttKand-Logic under scarce supervision, Soft-PNet matches loss-engineered prototypical networks at the concept and label levels and recovers concepts that soft-grounding baselines miss, with no loss engineering and lower training time.