Knowledge, Rules and Their Embeddings: Two Paths towards Neuro-Symbolic JEPA
This work addresses the challenge of integrating human logic into AI systems for improved reliability in high-stakes domains like clinical applications, representing a novel method rather than an incremental step.
The paper tackles the problem of bridging self-supervised predictive architectures with rule-based systems to enhance robustness and interpretability, proposing a bidirectional neuro-symbolic framework called RiJEPA that reshapes representation manifolds and enables continuous rule discovery, with empirical evaluations confirming its efficacy.
Modern self-supervised predictive architectures excel at capturing complex statistical correlations from high-dimensional data but lack mechanisms to internalize verifiable human logic, leaving them susceptible to spurious correlations and shortcut learning. Conversely, traditional rule-based inference systems offer rigorous, interpretable logic but suffer from discrete boundaries and NP-hard combinatorial explosion. To bridge this divide, we propose a bidirectional neuro-symbolic framework centered around Rule-informed Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (RiJEPA). In the first direction, we inject structured inductive biases into JEPA training via Energy-Based Constraints (EBC) and a multi-modal dual-encoder architecture. This fundamentally reshapes the representation manifold, replacing arbitrary statistical correlations with geometrically sound logical basins. In the second direction, we demonstrate that by relaxing rigid, discrete symbolic rules into a continuous, differentiable logic, we can bypass traditional combinatorial search for new rule generation. By leveraging gradient-guided Langevin diffusion within the rule energy landscape, we introduce novel paradigms for continuous rule discovery, which enable unconditional joint generation, conditional forward and abductive inference, and marginal predictive translation. Empirical evaluations on both synthetic topological simulations and a high-stakes clinical use case confirm the efficacy of our approach. Ultimately, this framework establishes a powerful foundation for robust, generative, and interpretable neuro-symbolic representation learning.