Paper Detail

SoftReason: A Fully Differentiable Neuro-Soft-Symbolic Deductive Reasoning Architecture over High-Dimensional Perceptual Data

Wael AbdAlmageed

arxiv Score 7.6

Published 2026-07-22 · First seen 2026-07-23

General AI

Abstract

In many reasoning problems, the premises are not observed as discrete symbols, but must be inferred from high-dimensional inputs. Further, the predicate vocabulary, argument structure, and trusted evidence are supplied by a Knowledge Graph (KG), or rule definitions. Classical neuro-symbolic pipelines have a discrete interface between perception and deduction. We present a neuro-soft-symbolic architecture for differentiable deductive reasoning over latent perceptual facts and knowledge-provided predicates. SoftReason removes the gradient gap by representing the deductive state as a local soft interpretation tensor over candidate constants and predicates. Perception proposes probabilistic base facts, KG triples enter as high-confidence soft evidence, and every query anchor, predicate choice, and closure update remains differentiable. Our core innovation is a learned differentiable lift of the immediate-consequence operator. It uses predicate-definition embeddings and latent composition channels to form soft body-predicate mixtures, aggregate over all possible witnesses, propose query-conditioned head facts, and update the interpretation through a monotone probabilistic OR. We instantiate the framework on Knowledge-aware Visual Question Answering (KVQA), and demonstrates how SoftReason supports end-to-end perceptual grounding, KG evidence injection, and differentiable deductive closure in one trainable architecture.

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BibTeX

@article{abdalmageed2026softreason,
  title = {SoftReason: A Fully Differentiable Neuro-Soft-Symbolic Deductive Reasoning Architecture over High-Dimensional Perceptual Data},
  author = {Wael AbdAlmageed},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {In many reasoning problems, the premises are not observed as discrete symbols, but must be inferred from high-dimensional inputs. Further, the predicate vocabulary, argument structure, and trusted evidence are supplied by a Knowledge Graph (KG), or rule definitions. Classical neuro-symbolic pipelines have a discrete interface between perception and deduction. We present a neuro-soft-symbolic architecture for differentiable deductive reasoning over latent perceptual facts and knowledge-provided p},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20402},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2607.20402},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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