Home /Research /Learning Compositional Symbolic Task Rules from Demonstrations with Inductive Logic Programming
LEARNINGOpen access

Learning Compositional Symbolic Task Rules from Demonstrations with Inductive Logic Programming

Oleh Borys, Karla Stepanova

2026

Abstract

Learning from Demonstration~(LfD) should capture not only how a task is executed, but also its high-level task structure that explains the demonstrated behavior. As robots become more autonomous, such task representations must be inspectable, reusable, and human-interpretable. To address this, we study how to represent and learn robotic tasks with inductive logic programming~(ILP) by decomposing a complex task into a series of simpler learning objectives at different abstraction (ontological) levels. The system infers symbolic rules from demonstrations and prior (domain) knowledge, and reuses learned rules when learning higher-level task structure. We evaluate the approach in a synthetic block-assembly scenario and show that the learned abstractions are interpretable and support strong generalization to harder, held-out tasks with unseen objects. These results provide preliminary evidence that decomposed ILP is a feasible approach to task-level LfD.

Keywords

Learning from DemonstrationInductive Logic Programmingtask decompositionsymbolic rulesgeneralization

Related papers