Safety, Security, and Cognitive Risks in Neuro-Symbolic AI

Abstract

Neuro-symbolic AI (NeSy) pairs neural perception with symbolic reasoning, making it attractive for high-stakes domains where explainability and structured inference are required. However, this hybrid architecture introduces an enlarged attack surface spanning five layers: neural perception, symbolic knowledge bases, reasoning engines, agentic orchestration, and data stores -- each exploitable in ways absent from purely neural systems. This paper makes six contributions: (1) formal definitions of NeSy Attack Surface, Symbolic Integrity Violation (SIV), and Cross-Layer Amplification Ratio $\mathcal{X}$, decomposed into neural-caused and autonomous symbolic sensitivity components; (2) a unified threat model extending MITRE ATLAS with 11 NeSy-specific tactic extensions and a five-profile attacker taxonomy; (3) a symbolic-layer threat catalogue covering knowledge graph (KG) poisoning, ontology-merging, and inference-engine subversion; (4) analysis of cognitive risks -- automation bias, authority bias, and sycophantic reinforcement -- structurally amplified by NeSy&#39;s explicit logical explanations relative to black-box neural outputs; (5) interdisciplinary mitigations with measurable acceptance criteria aligned to NIST AI 600-1 and the EU AI Act; (6) three empirical benchmarks: (E1) targeted KG poisoning achieves break-even SIV at injection budget $B=5$ on a 205-entity medical KG, with a KG-specific stealth/SIV trade-off; (E2) PGD-10 at $\varepsilon=0.01$ yields $\mathcal{X}=5.884$ (95% CI $[4.64,\, 8.00]$, $p<0.0001$), confirmed adversarially specific by a matched-random baseline ($E^{R}_{\mathrm{rand}}=0$), on a DistilBERT+ProbLog pipeline; (E3) single-axiom OWL edits achieve 93.3% SIV success with 100% Pellet-consistency stealth, but held-out STIX detection fails at 50% (random-guessing level), an open problem.