While compositional accounts of human language understanding are based on a hierarchical tree-like process, neural models like transformers lack a direct inductive bias for such tree structures. Introducing syntactic inductive biases could unlock more robust and data-efficient learning in transformer language models (LMs), but existing methods for incorporating such structure greatly restrict models, either limiting their expressivity or increasing inference complexity. This work instead aims to softly inject syntactic inductive biases into given transformer circuits, through a structured regularizer. We introduce TreeReg, an auxiliary loss function that converts bracketing decisions from silver parses into a set of differentiable orthogonality constraints on vector hidden states. TreeReg integrates seamlessly with the standard LM objective, requiring no architectural changes. LMs pre-trained with TreeReg on natural language corpora such as WikiText-103 achieve up to 10% lower perplexities on out-of-distribution data and up to 9.5 point improvements in syntactic generalization, requiring less than half the training data to outperform standard LMs. TreeReg still provides gains for pre-trained LLMs: Continued pre-training of Sheared Llama with TreeReg results in improved syntactic generalization, and fine-tuning on MultiNLI with TreeReg mitigates degradation of performance on adversarial NLI benchmarks by 41.2 points. We release all code to guide future research.

We consider two popular approaches to KnowledgeGraph Completion (KGC): textual modelsthat rely on textual entity descriptions, andstructure-based models that exploit the connectivitystructure of the Knowledge Graph(KG). Preliminary experiments show that theseapproaches have complementary strengths:structure-based models perform exceptionallywell when the gold answer is easily reachablefrom the query head in the KG, while textualmodels exploit descriptions to give goodperformance even when the gold answer isnot easily reachable. In response, we proposeDynaSemble, a novel method for learningquery-dependent ensemble weights to combinethese approaches by using the distributions ofscores assigned by the models in the ensembleto all candidate entities. DynaSemble achievesstate-of-the-art results on three standard KGCdatasets, with up to 6.8 pt MRR and 8.3 ptHits@1 gains over the best baseline model forthe WN18RR dataset.

Recent works leverage LLMs to roleplay realistic social scenarios, aiding novices in practicing their social skills. However, simulating sensitive interactions, such as in the domain of mental health, is challenging. Privacy concerns restrict data access, and collecting expert feedback, although vital, is laborious. To address this, we develop Roleplay-doh, a novel human-LLM collaboration pipeline that elicits qualitative feedback from a domain-expert, which is transformed into a set of principles, or natural language rules, that govern an LLM-prompted roleplay. We apply this pipeline to enable senior mental health supporters to create customized AI patients as simulated practice partners for novice counselors. After uncovering issues with basic GPT-4 simulations not adhering to expert-defined principles, we also introduce a novel principle-adherence prompting pipeline which shows a 30% improvement in response quality and principle following for the downstream task. Through a user study with 25 counseling experts, we demonstrate that the pipeline makes it easy and effective to create AI patients that more faithfully resemble real patients, as judged by both creators and third-party counselors. We provide access to the code and data on our project website: https://roleplay-doh.github.io/.

High-quality and high-coverage rule sets are imperative to the success of Neuro-Symbolic Knowledge Graph Completion (NS-KGC) models, because they form the basis of all symbolic inferences. Recent literature builds neural models for generating rule sets, however, preliminary experiments show that they struggle with maintaining high coverage. In this work, we suggest three simple augmentations to existing rule sets: (1) transforming rules to their abductive forms, (2) generating equivalent rules that use inverse forms of constituent relations and (3) random walks that propose new rules. Finally, we prune potentially low quality rules. Experiments over four datasets and five ruleset-baseline settings suggest that these simple augmentations consistently improve results, and obtain up to 7.1 pt MRR and 8.5 pt Hits@1 gains over using rules without augmentations.