Abstract: Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) is a well-known machine learning technique for learning concepts from relational data. Nevertheless, ILP systems are not robust enough to noisy or unseen data in real world domains. Furthermore, in multi-class problems, if the example is not matched with any learned rules, it cannot be classified. This paper presents a novel hybrid learning method to alleviate this restriction by enabling Neural Networks to handle first-order logic programs directly. The proposed method, called First-Order Logical Neural Network (FOLNN), employs the standard feedforward neural network and integrates inductive learning from examples and background knowledge. We also propose a method for determining the appropriate variable substitution in FOLNN learning by using Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL). In the experiments, the proposed method has been evaluated on two first-order learning problems, i.e., the Finite Element Mesh Design and Mutagenesis and compared with the state-of-the-art, the PROGOL system. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than PROGOL.
