The paper investigates how verb–noun decomposition, a common strategy for recognizing assembly actions, generalizes to novel combinations of familiar components. Through a systematic study on three datasets (MECCANO, HAViD, and IMPACT), the authors find that while decomposition avoids the zero‑probability ceiling of atomic classifiers, its performance still heavily depends on the co‑occurrence patterns seen during training. The analysis reveals that errors concentrate on the larger‑vocabulary component, that shared‑encoder training can entangle components and worsen generalization, and that these issues stem from primitive support, vocabulary asymmetry, and component entanglement.
arXiv:2604. 26157v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structural generalization in semantic parsing requires systems to apply learned compositional rules to novel structural combinations.
arXiv:2609.31456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) often struggle with compositional reasoning tasks, but the reasons for this underperformance remain unclear. A common hyp...
arXiv:2606. 15521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string.
The paper compares latent representations in Selective State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba and Transformers such as Pythia using Sparse Autoencoders. Across a 10‑million token corpus, 99.98% of Mamba features align closely with Pythia’s, supporting the Universality Hypothesis that core semantic representations are similar across architectures. A tiny 0.02% of features diverge, with Mamba’s recurrent bottleneck causing it to compress syntactic anomalies into polysemantic neurons, whereas Pythia’s attention can isolate distinct formatting edge‑cases.
The paper introduces Exemplar Partitioning (EP), an unsupervised technique that constructs interpretable feature dictionaries from large language model activations by clustering streamed activations into Voronoi regions defined by exemplars and their averages. EP allows comparison of dictionaries across layers, checkpoints, and architectures, and demonstrates utility in interpreting model behavior, tracking training dynamics, detecting hidden concepts, and enabling targeted interventions. Experiments on Gemma‑2‑2B and Llama‑3.1‑8B show EP can reveal how instruction tuning reorganizes harmful prompt activations, facilitate interventions that alter model responses, and achieve high concept‑detection performance while requiring far fewer construction tokens than comparable methods.
arXiv:2608. 05238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training multimodal models to align time series with language runs into a self-supervision trap.
arXiv:2606. 24259v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuned encoders deployed across heterogeneous NLP tasks face three compounding problems: mismatched inductive biases, class-imbalance corruption of feature statistics, and no mechanism to condition attention on external lexical knowledge.
arXiv:2608. 06111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Positional embeddings (PE) in Transformers encode token distance and order but are largely agnostic to \textit{syntactic structure}.
arXiv:2608. 10537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have helped uncover mechanistic explanations for LLM behaviours such as reasoning, jailbreaking etc.
The study examines how the geometric placement of synthetic data affects discourse‑pragmatic function classification. Using 410 annotated instances of the word "look" from the British National Corpus, synthetic examples were generated with Llama 3.1 and grouped by cosine distance from real data in RoBERTa space. Six training conditions were compared, showing that examples close to real data (NEAR) yield the largest macro‑F gain, while a distance‑balanced mix gives the highest accuracy, yet none improve AUC.
arXiv:2602. 24264v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Compositional generalization, the ability to recognize familiar parts in novel contexts, is a defining property of intelligent systems.
arXiv:2506. 20699v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning in non-stationary and multi-context environments requires more than ordinary within-task generalization.