Neuro-symbolic computing with spiking neural networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel framework for encoding and reasoning over knowledge graphs using spiking neural networks, combining graph embedding and error backpropagation for end-to-end training.

Contribution

It introduces a method to perform symbolic reasoning on knowledge graphs with spiking neural networks, bridging the gap between symbolic data and neural computation.

Findings

Successfully encoded multi-relational data with spiking neurons

Enabled end-to-end training of spiking relational graph neural networks

Demonstrated reasoning capabilities on symbolic graph structures

Abstract

Knowledge graphs are an expressive and widely used data structure due to their ability to integrate data from different domains in a sensible and machine-readable way. Thus, they can be used to model a variety of systems such as molecules and social networks. However, it still remains an open question how symbolic reasoning could be realized in spiking systems and, therefore, how spiking neural networks could be applied to such graph data. Here, we extend previous work on spike-based graph algorithms by demonstrating how symbolic and multi-relational information can be encoded using spiking neurons, allowing reasoning over symbolic structures like knowledge graphs with spiking neural networks. The introduced framework is enabled by combining the graph embedding paradigm and the recent progress in training spiking neural networks using error backpropagation. The presented methods are applicable to a variety of spiking neuron models and can be trained end-to-end in combination with other differentiable network architectures, which we demonstrate by implementing a spiking relational graph neural network.