Learning Interpretable Differentiable Logic Networks for Tabular Regression

Neural networks (NNs) achieve outstanding performance in many domains; however, their decision processes are often opaque and their inference can be computationally expensive in resource-constrained environments. We recently proposed Differentiable Logic Networks (DLNs) to address these issues for tabular classification based on relaxing discrete logic into a differentiable form, thereby enabling gradient-based learning of networks built from binary logic operations. DLNs offer interpretable reasoning and substantially lower inference cost. We extend the DLN framework to supervised tabular regression. We first redesign the final output layer (the SumLayer) to support continuous targets. More critically, we find the original two-phase training procedure used for classification is suboptimal for regression, and thus develop a unified, single-stage optimization procedure. We also demonstrate that temperature annealing of the network’s differentiable relaxations is decisive for achieving stable convergence and high accuracy. We evaluate the resulting model on 15 public regression benchmarks, comparing it with modern neural networks and classical regression baselines. Regression DLNs match or exceed baseline accuracy while preserving interpretability and fast inference. Our results show that DLNs are a viable, cost-effective alternative for regression tasks, especially where model transparency and computational efficiency are important.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
Published
2026-02-04
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3795533
Primary Topic
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Learning Interpretable Differentiable Logic Networks for Tabular Regression

Chang Yue, Niraj K. Jha
ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
article

Learning Interpretable Differentiable Logic Networks for Tabular Regression

Chang Yue, Niraj K. Jha
article en

Abstract

Neural networks (NNs) achieve outstanding performance in many domains; however, their decision processes are often opaque and their inference can be computationally expensive in resource-constrained environments. We recently proposed Differentiable Logic Networks (DLNs) to address these issues for tabular classification based on relaxing discrete logic into a differentiable form, thereby enabling gradient-based learning of networks built from binary logic operations. DLNs offer interpretable reasoning and substantially lower inference cost. We extend the DLN framework to supervised tabular regression. We first redesign the final output layer (the SumLayer) to support continuous targets. More critically, we find the original two-phase training procedure used for classification is suboptimal for regression, and thus develop a unified, single-stage optimization procedure. We also demonstrate that temperature annealing of the network’s differentiable relaxations is decisive for achieving stable convergence and high accuracy. We evaluate the resulting model on 15 public regression benchmarks, comparing it with modern neural networks and classical regression baselines. Regression DLNs match or exceed baseline accuracy while preserving interpretability and fast inference. Our results show that DLNs are a viable, cost-effective alternative for regression tasks, especially where model transparency and computational efficiency are important.

ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems
Princeton University (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 68%
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
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Learning Interpretable Differentiable Logic Networks for Tabular Regression — Chang Yue, Niraj K. Jha · ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS