Neurosymbolic Deep Generative Models for Sequence Data with Relational Constraints

Halley Young, Maxwell Du, Osbert Bastani

Keywords: synthesis, music, generative, constraints

Abstract: There has been significant recent progress designing deep generative models that generate realistic sequence data such as text or music. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to incorporate high-level structure to guide the generative process, and many such models perform well on local coherence at the cost of global coherence. We propose a novel approach for incorporating global structure in the form of relational constraints between different subcomponents of an example (e.g., lines of a poem or measures of music). Our generative model has two parts: (i) one model to generate a realistic set of relational constraints, and (ii) a second model to generate realistic data satisfying these constraints. For model (i), we propose a program synthesis algorithm that infers the relational constraints present in the training data, and then learn a generative model based on the resulting constraint data. In our experiments, we show that our approach significantly improves over state-of-the-art in terms of capturing high-level structure in the data, while performing comparably or better in terms of low-level structure.

One-sentence Summary: We use program synthesis to learn and condition on the relational structure of real sequential data.