  Deep learning has been shown to achieve impressive results in several tasks
where a large amount of training data is available. However, deep learning
solely focuses on the accuracy of the predictions, neglecting the reasoning
process leading to a decision, which is a major issue in life-critical
applications. Probabilistic logic reasoning allows to exploit both statistical
regularities and specific domain expertise to perform reasoning under
uncertainty, but its scalability and brittle integration with the layers
processing the sensory data have greatly limited its applications. For these
reasons, combining deep architectures and probabilistic logic reasoning is a
fundamental goal towards the development of intelligent agents operating in
complex environments. This paper presents Relational Neural Machines, a novel
framework allowing to jointly train the parameters of the learners and of a
First--Order Logic based reasoner. A Relational Neural Machine is able to
recover both classical learning from supervised data in case of pure
sub-symbolic learning, and Markov Logic Networks in case of pure symbolic
reasoning, while allowing to jointly train and perform inference in hybrid
learning tasks. Proper algorithmic solutions are devised to make learning and
inference tractable in large-scale problems. The experiments show promising
results in different relational tasks.

Artificial Intelligence;Machine Learning