NAROCE: A Neural Algorithmic Reasoner Framework for Online Complex Event Detection

TL;DR

NAROCE introduces a two-stage neural framework for online complex event detection, leveraging pseudo data for rule learning and sensor data adaptation, resulting in improved accuracy, generalization, and data efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel decoupled approach for online complex event detection, combining rule learning from pseudo data with sensor data adaptation, enhancing robustness and reducing data requirements.

Findings

Outperforms baselines in accuracy and generalization

Requires less than half the labeled data for comparable performance

Improves robustness to longer and unseen sequences

Abstract

Modern machine learning models excel at detecting individual actions, objects, or scene attributes from short, local observations. However, many real-world tasks, such as in smart cities and healthcare, require reasoning over complex events (CEs): (spatio)temporal, rule-governed patterns of short-term atomic events (AEs) that reflect high-level understanding and critical changes in the environment. These CEs are difficult to detect online: they are often rare, require long-range reasoning over noisy sensor data, must generalize rules beyond fixed-length traces, and suffer from limited real-world datasets due to the high annotation burden. We propose NAROCE, a Neural Algorithmic Reasoning framework for Online CE detection that separates the task into two stages: (i) learning CE rules from large-scale, low-cost pseudo AE concept traces generated by simulators or LLMs, and (ii) training an adapter to map real sensor data into the learned reasoning space using fewer labeled sensor samples. Experiments show that NAROCE outperforms the strongest baseline in accuracy, generalization to longer, unseen sequences, and data efficiency, achieving comparable performance with less than half the labeled data. These results suggest that decoupling CE rule learning from raw sensor inputs improves both data efficiency and robustness.