In plain words: Deep learning models are trained with an extra part that encodes human-written rules, so the model follows them along with the data. At test time you can dial rule strength up or down without retraining; it followed rules far more often while being more accurate.
Abstract
We propose a novel training method that integrates rules into deep learning, in a way the strengths of the rules are controllable at inference. Deep Neural Networks with Controllable Rule Representations (DeepCTRL) incorporates a rule encoder into the model coupled with a rule-based objective, enabling a shared representation for decision making. DeepCTRL is agnostic to data type and model architecture. It can be applied to any kind of rule defined for inputs and outputs. The key aspect of DeepCTRL is that it does not require retraining to adapt the rule strength -- at inference, the user can adjust it based on the desired operation point on accuracy vs. rule verification ratio. In real-world domains where incorporating rules is critical -- such as Physics, Retail and Healthcare -- we show the effectiveness of DeepCTRL in teaching rules for deep learning. DeepCTRL improves the trust and reliability of the trained models by significantly increasing their rule verification ratio, while also providing accuracy gains at downstream tasks. Additionally, DeepCTRL enables novel use cases such as hypothesis testing of the rules on data samples, and unsupervised adaptation based on shared rules between datasets.
Sungyong Seo, Sercan O. Arik, Jinsung Yoon, Xiang Zhang, Kihyuk Sohn, Tomas Pfister
arXiv:2106.07804 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Jun 14, 2021 · updated Nov 17, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · Thirty-Fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)