Recent advancements in neuro-symbolic learning (NeSy) have shown significant promise in integrating deep learning with symbolic reasoning, offering both interpretability and generalization. However, the prevalence of reasoning shortcuts, where the NeSy system predicts incorrect intermediate concepts while maintaining high final accuracy, poses a substantial challenge. This is especially problematic in domains requiring reliable and transparent decision-making. Inspired by recent theories, we find that existing methods fail to address the reasoning shortcut issue when the knowledge base lacks sufficient complexity, highlighting their vulnerability in real-world applications. In this work, we present a novel method called DKA to address this issue. It introduces a limited set of concept-supervised data to enhance the knowledge base, effectively solving the reasoning shortcut problem and improving the applicability of the NeSy system. Theoretical analysis reveals that DKA can reduce shortcut risks with improved data efficiency. Empirical studies across multiple tasks within various neuro-symbolic frameworks also verify the effectiveness of the DKA method.
Yu-Feng Li, Xiaowen Yang, Wenda Wei et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
Training large language models (LLMs) to act in long-horizon games is a promising step toward generalist decision-making, yet reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) relies on sparse final rewards that reveal little about which decisions determine success. Denser process signals could supply this missing turn-level credit, but existing sources are hard to keep both cheap and accurate. We observe that changes in a game solver's state value reveal whether an action advances the state toward success. Building on this insight, we propose CAST (Credit Assignment from Solver Teachers), which converts these value changes into solver advantages and injects them into RLVR as turn-level signals. We further show that, under a soft-optimal solver assumption, maximizing the solver advantage is equivalent to on-policy distillation from the solver, requiring only scalar values rather than teacher logits. Across Sokoban, Minesweeper, and Rush Hour, CAST outperforms all trained baselines on every game under both in-domain and unseen-difficulty evaluation and achieves the highest average zero-shot performance on ALFWorld and WebShop. Our code is available at https://github.com/Wloner0809/CAST.
Yu Wang, Yi-Kai Zhang, Wentao Shi et al.· 0 citations
