NeSySpec: Neuro-Symbolic Technical Intelligence for Auditing Engineering Specifications with an Application to Aircraft

Pier Mattia Basciano, Gianvito Antenori, Cristiano Andolfi, Giovanni Farina, Salvatore Monteleone

Engineers who audit a declared specification of an engineered system need to know which physical constraints it respects, which it violates, which field was altered and how to correct it. NeSySpec is an integrated and interpretable neuro-symbolic audit framework, built on Logic Tensor Networks, that answers these questions in one pipeline. Its axioms encode the physical relations of the domain as differentiable graded predicates whose tolerances are learned from a fleet of real records; from the same degrees, it diagnoses the violated constraint, identifies the altered field by abduction, proposes a minimum-change correction and ties image evidence to the parts it describes, abstaining exactly where evidence is missing, and returns all of it in one verification report. We validate NeSySpec on 107 aircraft types, with 16 test aircraft of 9 families held out of training, on specification records paired with ground photographs and satellite imagery and on synthetic errors: generated corruptions, edits labeled from the edit alone and deliberate falsifications. NeSySpec combines all the assessed audit outputs in one pipeline, which no learned, rule-based, solver-based, neuro-symbolic…