Differentiable Horn Programs: A Constructive Expressivity Theorem for Latent Rule Operators
arXiv:2609.06235
Abstract
We introduce \textsc{LatentGamma}, a differentiable operator on the unit cube designed as a smooth surrogate of Tarski's immediate consequence operator $\TP$ associated with a definite Horn program on atoms. The operator is built as a five-stage composition combining sigmoidal gating, softmax routing, and a residual update that enforces monotonicity by construction. We establish four theoretical results. First, the iterated sequence is coordinate-wise non-decreasing and bounded by $\ind$, hence converges to a fixed point of \textsc{LatentGamma}; the operator itself is lattice-monotone on . Second, our \emph{constructive expressivity theorem} shows that for every definite Horn program there exists a closed-form parameter assignment and an explicit time bound such that the iterated sequence \emph{exactly} reproduces $\TPinf(F_0)$ for every initial fact set throughout the window , where is the derivation depth. The window is large in practice ( for sparse programs) and reflects the finite-time nature of computation by smooth sigmoidal gates. Third, the oracle is robust to Gaussian noise on its body and head logits, with explicit non-asymptotic bounds. Fourth, we prove a matching information-theoretic lower bound on the parameter count. We provide a complete numerical validation on programs ranging from to atoms: oracle accuracy reaches on test cases with zero false-positive and false-negative rates, and the empirical noise tolerance scales precisely as the union bound predicts.