A Neural Network With Logical Reasoning Based on Auxiliary Inputs

This paper describes a neural network design using auxiliary inputs, namely the indicators, that act as the hints to explain the predicted outcome through logical reasoning, mimicking the human behavior of deductive reasoning. Besides the original network input and output, we add an auxiliary input that reflects the specific logic of the data to formulate a reasoning process for cross-validation. We found that one can design either meaningful indicators, or even meaningless ones, when using such auxiliary inputs, upon which one can use as the basis of reasoning to explain the predicted outputs. As a result, one can formulate different reasonings to explain the predicted results by designing different sets of auxiliary inputs without the loss of trustworthiness of the outcome. This is similar to human explanation process where one can explain the same observation from different perspectives with reasons. We demonstrate our network concept by using the MNIST data with different sets of auxiliary inputs, where a series of design guidelines are concluded. Later, we validated our results by using a set of images taken from a robotic grasping platform. We found that our network enhanced the last 1–2% of the prediction accuracy while eliminating questionable predictions with self-conflicting logics. Future application of our network with auxiliary inputs can be applied to robotic detection problems such as autonomous object grasping, where the logical reasoning can be introduced to optimize robotic learning.