Inferring the Invisible: Neuro-Symbolic Rule Discovery for Missing Value Imputation
📄 Abstract: One of the central challenges in artificial intelligence is reasoning under partial observability, where key values are missing but essential for understanding and modeling the system. This paper presents a neuro-symbolic framework for latent rule discovery and missing value imputation. In contrast to traditional latent variable models, our approach treats missing grounded values as latent predicates to be inferred through logical reasoning. By interleaving neural representation learning with symbolic rule induction, the model iteratively discovers—both conjunctive and disjunctive rules—that explain observed patterns and recover missing entries. Our framework seamlessly handles heterogeneous data, reasoning over both discrete and continuous features by learning soft predicates from continuous values. Crucially, the inferred values not only fill in gaps in the data but also serve as supporting evidence for further rule induction and inference—creating a feedback loop in which imputation and rule mining reinforce one another. Using a staged block-coordinate gradient descent, the system learns these rules end-to-end by iteratively optimizing over parameter blocks in an alternating fashion. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method effectively imputes missing values while uncovering meaningful, human-interpretable rules that govern system dynamics.
🔗 Link to paper: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=26Msp6pV5i
👩🏻🔬 Bio: Shuang Li is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the School of Data Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. She received her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2019. Following her Ph.D., she worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Susan Murphy in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University.
Her research has been published in top-tier machine learning conferences and journals, including ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, and JMLR. Her work has been selected for oral and spotlight presentations at ICML and NeurIPS, and one of her papers received the Best Paper Award at the NeurIPS GenAI4Health Workshop. She was also a finalist in the INFORMS Quality, Statistics, and Reliability (QSR) Best Student Paper Competition and the Social Media Analytics Best Student Paper Competition.