Neural Structural Reasoner: A Brain-inspired Architecture for Reasoning over Structured Knowledge
Zixing Jia, Yuhang Pan, Ni Ji
Abstract
Structural reasoning, the ability to recognize and make inferences over the relational structure between objects and concepts, is a hallmark of human cognition, yet prevailing methods often collapse relational topology into flat embeddings, cannot discover hidden structure and lack interpretability. We introduce Neural Structural Reasoner (NSR), a brain-inspired network that preserves relational structure directly in the connectivity and dynamics of coupled neuronal populations. NSR draws inspiration from three biological mechanisms: multi-layered architecture for encoding hierarchical knowledge, stable representations of entity and concepts, and path integration for input-driven state inference. At query time, NSR parallelizes computation over candidate relational structures and leverages confidence-weighted scores to perform link prediction. Across standard knowledge-graph benchmarks, NSR achieves competitive accuracy without leading on every dataset, and has lower reported training times than several neural baselines. Because reasoning is implemented through sequences of human-readable neuron activations, NSR affords native interpretability by tracking intermediate inference steps. The model further extracts latent relational hierarchies and compositional rules, demonstrating the brain-inspired architecture as an effective, efficient, and highly interpretable substrate for structural reasoning.