cs.AINov 3, 2026

ALBI: LLM-Guided Inductive Logic Programming via Iterative Generate-Test-Constrain Refineme

Authors: Aboubaker Seddiq Benterki, Jüri Vain, Gert Kanter, Leelo Aino Jürgenstein

Organizations: Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), Ehitajate tee 5, 19086 Tallinn, Estonia

Abstract

We introduce ALBI (Agent for Learning By Induction), a neuro-symbolic ILP framework that replaces the ASP-based hypothesis generator in the Learning from Failures (LFF) paradigm with a Large Language Model (LLM), while retaining SWI-Prolog as a formal verifier. ALBI implements an iterative generate-test-constrain loop: the LLM proposes candidate hypotheses from structured prompts; Prolog tests each candidate; and diagnostic feedback drives refinement. We further introduce semantic anonymization, a metamorphic testing methodology, to distinguish structural symbolic induction from surface-level pattern matching on predicate names. Experiments on 30 standard ILP benchmarks show that ALBI achieves 100% success across three frontier LLMs (Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT 5.4 Pro, Claude Opus 4.6), matching Popper while requiring only 1.4-1.7 iterations on average. Under anonymization, all models maintain 100% success with a moderate iteration increase (1.36-1.67 times), providing evidence of robust symbolic reasoning.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Aug 11, 2026

Hypothesis Frontier: Verifier Guided LLM and Symbolic Search for First-Order Induction

First-order concept synthesis asks a system to infer one formula that classifies labeled objects consistently across several finite relational structures. Every candidate can be evaluated exactly, but quantified first-order formulas form a vast search space, and LLM outputs are often semantically promising without being fully correct. We introduce Hypothesis Frontier, a verifier-guided neurosymbolic framework that evaluates each LLM formula on every training object, retains the strongest verified hypothesis across rounds, and uses its remaining errors to guide subsequent generation. Symbolic processing repairs invalid formulas while remaining anchored to the LLM-generated hypothesis, and simplifies train-valid formulas without changing any training prediction. Under matched models, problem sets, and LLM-round budgets, Hypothesis Frontier solves substantially more problems than repeated original-prompt generation. After the final formulas are selected, exact simplification shortens many train-valid formulas while preserving every training prediction. Exact symbolic reasoning therefore helps both to solve more induction problems and to compress many of the resulting formulas.
Jul 25, 2026

Reason Popper-ly: Patching In-Context Reasoning with Inductive Logic Programming

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables large language models (LLMs) to tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, yet the generated intermediate steps are not guaranteed to be logically sound. We present Reason Popper-ly, a neurosymbolic framework that uses inductive logic programming (ILP) to learn relation composition rules from reasoning traces and deploys them as an online verifier for step-level correction. Given an LLM-generated trace, the method checks each inferred step against the learned rule table, diagnoses the violation type, rewrites incorrect steps with symbolically derived repairs, and regenerates the remaining suffix so that the model can produce its final answer conditioned on a verified trace. We evaluate on CLUTRR, a multi-hop kinship reasoning benchmark, using five language models over reasoning chains of 2 to 10 hops. Across all models, Reason Popper-ly consistently improves terminal accuracy over standard CoT, with gains of up to 48 percentage points for small models and 15 points for frontier models on the longest chains. Compared with a fully exogenous symbolic pipeline, our method performs better on harder instances by preserving the model's successful grounding while correcting only verifiable reasoning failures. In addition, step-level ILP verification yields a fine-grained error taxonomy that provides diagnostic insight beyond final-answer accuracy.
May 5, 2026

ANDRE: An Attention-based Neuro-symbolic Differentiable Rule Extractor for Inductive Logic Programming

Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) aims to learn interpretable first-order rules from data, but existing symbolic and neuro-symbolic approaches struggle to scale to noisy and probabilistic settings. Classical ILP relies on discrete combinatorial rule search and is brittle under uncertainty, while differentiable ILP methods typically depend on predefined rule templates or inaccurate fuzzy operators that suffer from vanishing gradients or poor approximation of logical structure when reasoning over probabilistic predicate valuations. This paper proposes an Attention-based Neuro-symbolic Differentiable Rule Extractor (ANDRE), a novel ILP framework that learns first-order logic programs by optimizing over a continuous rule space with attention-based logical operators. ANDRE replaces both rule templates and logical operators with fully differentiable, attention-driven conjunction and disjunction operators that approximate logical min-max semantics, enabling accurate, stable, and interpretable reasoning over probabilistic data. By softly selecting, negating, or excluding predicates within each rule, ANDRE supports flexible rule induction while preserving symbolic structure. Extensive experiments on classical ILP benchmarks, large-scale knowledge bases, and synthetic datasets with probabilistic predicates and noisy supervision demonstrate that ANDRE achieves competitive or superior predictive performance while reliably recovering correct symbolic rules under uncertainty. In particular, ANDRE remains robust to moderate label noise, substantially outperforming existing differentiable ILP methods in both rule extraction quality and stability.