cs.AIAug 13, 2026

Moose: Latent concept learning with reasoning-shortcut awareness in EL++\mathcal{EL}^{++}

Authors: Olga MashkovaAsaad MohammedsalehFernando Zhapa-CamachoRobert Hoehndorf

Organizations: Computer Science Program, Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences & Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal 23955, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The OWL 2 EL profile is used in some of the largest production ontologies, including the Gene Ontology and SNOMED CT. Existing neuro-symbolic (NeSy) learning methods accept propositional theories or Datalog, and reasoning-shortcut (RS) awareness has not been investigated in ontology settings. We present Moose, a method that compiles an EL++\mathcal{EL}^{++} TBox and finite ABox to a Sentential Decision Diagram (SDD). The SDD acts as a differentiable weighted-model-counting layer, and we add closure clauses outside the EL++\mathcal{EL}^{++} profile on declared exhaustive families to overcome the limited expressivity of EL++\mathcal{EL}^{++} under partial supervision. We show termination, soundness, completeness, and polynomial intermediate sizes, and validate the proofs in Lean. We then define the first formal partial-supervision latent-concept-learning task over an OWL EL ontology, i.e., learning per-individual classifiers for latent concepts from observed ABox literals, and evaluate Moose on MNIST-with-ontology and Pizzaïolo. Moose improves over propositional-NeSy, fuzzy-logic, and ontology embedding baselines, and presents the first reasoning-shortcut analysis in an OWL EL setting.

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