A Survey on Verification and Validation, Testing and Evaluations of Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Neurosymbolic artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging branch of AI that combines the strengths of symbolic AI and sub-symbolic AI. Symbolic AI is based on the idea that intelligence can be represented using semantically meaningful symbolic rules and representations, while deep learning (DL), or sometimes called sub-symbolic AI, is based on the idea that intelligence emerges from the collective behavior of artificial neurons that are connected to each other. A major drawback of DL is that it acts as a “black box”, meaning that predictions are difficult to explain, making the testing & evaluation (T&E) and validation & verification (V&V) processes of a system that uses sub-symbolic AI a challenge. Since neurosymbolic AI combines the advantages of both symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, this survey explores how neurosymbolic applications can ease the V&V process. This survey considers two taxonomies of neurosymbolic AI, evaluates them, and analyzes which algorithms are commonly used as the symbolic and sub-symbolic components in current applications. Additionally, an overview of current techniques for the T&E and V&V processes of these components is provided. Furthermore, it is investigated how the symbolic part is used for T&E and V&V purposes in current neurosymbolic applications. Our research shows that neurosymbolic AI has great potential to ease the T&E and V&V processes of sub-symbolic AI by leveraging the possibilities of symbolic AI. Additionally, the applicability of current T&E and V&V methods to neurosymbolic AI is assessed, and how different neurosymbolic architectures can impact these methods is explored. It is found that current T&E and V&V techniques are partly sufficient to test, evaluate, verify, or validate the symbolic and sub-symbolic part of neurosymbolic applications independently, while some of them use approaches where current T&E and V&V methods are not applicable by default, and adjustments or even new approaches are needed. Our research shows that there is great potential in using symbolic AI to test, evaluate, verify, or validate the predictions of a sub-symbolic model, making neurosymbolic AI an interesting research direction for safe, secure, and trustworthy AI.