TT-Sparse: Learning Sparse Rule Models with Differentiable Truth Tables

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Soegeng, Hans Farrell, Modi, Sarthak Ketanbhai, Peyrin, Thomas
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Soegeng, Hans Farrell
Modi, Sarthak Ketanbhai
Peyrin, Thomas
author_facet Soegeng, Hans Farrell
Modi, Sarthak Ketanbhai
Peyrin, Thomas
contents Interpretable machine learning is essential in high-stakes domains where decision-making requires accountability, transparency, and trust. While rule-based models offer global and exact interpretability, learning rule sets that simultaneously achieve high predictive performance and low, human-understandable complexity remains challenging. To address this, we introduce TT-Sparse, a flexible neural building block that leverages differentiable truth tables as nodes to learn sparse, effective connections. A key contribution of our approach is a new soft TopK operator with straight-through estimation for learning discrete, cardinality-constrained feature selection in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Crucially, the forward pass remains sparse, enabling efficient computation and exact symbolic rule extraction. As a result, each node (and the entire model) can be transformed exactly into compact, globally interpretable DNF/CNF Boolean formulas via Quine-McCluskey minimization. Extensive empirical results across 28 datasets spanning binary, multiclass, and regression tasks show that the learned sparse rules exhibit superior predictive performance with lower complexity compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07606
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TT-Sparse: Learning Sparse Rule Models with Differentiable Truth Tables
Soegeng, Hans Farrell
Modi, Sarthak Ketanbhai
Peyrin, Thomas
Machine Learning
Interpretable machine learning is essential in high-stakes domains where decision-making requires accountability, transparency, and trust. While rule-based models offer global and exact interpretability, learning rule sets that simultaneously achieve high predictive performance and low, human-understandable complexity remains challenging. To address this, we introduce TT-Sparse, a flexible neural building block that leverages differentiable truth tables as nodes to learn sparse, effective connections. A key contribution of our approach is a new soft TopK operator with straight-through estimation for learning discrete, cardinality-constrained feature selection in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Crucially, the forward pass remains sparse, enabling efficient computation and exact symbolic rule extraction. As a result, each node (and the entire model) can be transformed exactly into compact, globally interpretable DNF/CNF Boolean formulas via Quine-McCluskey minimization. Extensive empirical results across 28 datasets spanning binary, multiclass, and regression tasks show that the learned sparse rules exhibit superior predictive performance with lower complexity compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
title TT-Sparse: Learning Sparse Rule Models with Differentiable Truth Tables
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07606