  Neural-symbolic approaches have recently gained popularity to inject prior
knowledge into a learner without requiring it to induce this knowledge from
data. These approaches can potentially learn competitive solutions with a
significant reduction of the amount of supervised data. A large class of
neural-symbolic approaches is based on First-Order Logic to represent prior
knowledge, relaxed to a differentiable form using fuzzy logic. This paper shows
that the loss function expressing these neural-symbolic learning tasks can be
unambiguously determined given the selection of a t-norm generator. When
restricted to supervised learning, the presented theoretical apparatus provides
a clean justification to the popular cross-entropy loss, which has been shown
to provide faster convergence and to reduce the vanishing gradient problem in
very deep structures. However, the proposed learning formulation extends the
advantages of the cross-entropy loss to the general knowledge that can be
represented by a neural-symbolic method. Therefore, the methodology allows the
development of a novel class of loss functions, which are shown in the
experimental results to lead to faster convergence rates than the approaches
previously proposed in the literature.
