Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) approaches like Meta-Interpretive Learning (MIL) can learn, from few examples, recursive logic programs with invented predicates that generalise well to unseen instances. This ability relies on a background theory and negative examples, both carefully selected with expert knowledge of a learning problem and its solutions. But what if such a problem-specific background theory or negative examples are not available? We formalise this question as a new setting for Self-Supervised ILP and present a new MIL algorithm that learns in the new setting from some positive labelled, and zero or more unlabelled examples, and automatically generates, and labels, new positive and negative examples during learning. We implement this algorithm in Prolog in a new MIL system, called Poker. We compare Poker to state-of-the-art MIL system Louise on experiments learning grammars for Context-Free and L-System languages from labelled, positive example strings, no negative examples, and just the terminal vocabulary of a language, seen in examples, as a first-order background theory. We introduce a new approach for the principled selection of a second-order background theory as a Second Order Definite Normal Form (SONF), sufficiently general to learn all programs in a class, thus removing the need for a backgound theory tailored to a learning task. We find that Poker's performance improves with increasing numbers of automatically generated examples while Louise, bereft of negative examples, over-generalises.

Abstract In Meta-interpretive learning (MIL) the metarules, second-order datalog clauses acting as inductive bias, are manually defined by the user. In this work we show that second-order metarules for MIL can be learned by MIL. We define a generality ordering of metarules by $$\theta$$ θ -subsumption and show that user-defined sort metarules are derivable by specialisation of the most-general matrix metarules in a language class; and that these matrix metarules are in turn derivable by specialisation of third-order punch metarules with variables quantified over the set of atoms and for which only an upper bound on their number of literals need be user-defined. We show that the cardinality of a metarule language is polynomial in the number of literals in punch metarules. We re-frame MIL as metarule specialisation by resolution. We modify the MIL metarule specialisation operator to return new metarules rather than first-order clauses and prove the correctness of the new operator. We implement the new operator as TOIL, a sub-system of the MIL system Louise. Our experiments show that as user-defined sort metarules are progressively replaced by sort metarules learned by TOIL, Louise’s predictive accuracy and training times are maintained. We conclude that automatically derived metarules can replace user-defined metarules.

Abstract Meta-Interpretive Learners, like most ILP systems, learn by searching for a correct hypothesis in the hypothesis space, the powerset of all constructible clauses. We show how this exponentially-growing search can be replaced by the construction of a Top program: the set of clauses in all correct hypotheses that is itself a correct hypothesis. We give an algorithm for Top program construction and show that it constructs a correct Top program in polynomial time and from a finite number of examples. We implement our algorithm in Prolog as the basis of a new MIL system, Louise, that constructs a Top program and then reduces it by removing redundant clauses. We compare Louise to the state-of-the-art search-based MIL system Metagol in experiments on grid world navigation, graph connectedness and grammar learning datasets and find that Louise improves on Metagol’s predictive accuracy when the hypothesis space and the target theory are both large, or when the hypothesis space does not include a correct hypothesis because of “classification noise” in the form of mislabelled examples. When the hypothesis space or the target theory are small, Louise and Metagol perform equally well.