arXiv:2505.09716v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation is considered a hallmark of human and animal intelligence. To achieve OOD through composition, a sys...
By George Dimitriadis, Spyridon Samothrakis
arXiv:2505.09716v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation through composition requires a system to discover invariant properties from input-output associations and...
By George Dimitriadis, Spyridon Samothrakis
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.
By Arnas Uselis, Andrea Dittadi, Seong Joon Oh
The paper introduces a formal definition of compositional structure based on algorithmic information theory, stating that such structure emerges when combined parts reveal shared patterns not evident when modeled separately. It applies this definition across scales to identify where compositionality arises and then inverts the framework to generate new compositional objects by optimizing over strings and images. The resulting artifacts display clear hierarchical reuse and part‑whole organization, indicating that the definition captures genuine compositionality rather than generic complexity or regularity.
By Eric Elmoznino, Tejas Kasetty, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Yoshua Bengio, Guillaume Lajoie
The paper introduces a dependency‑graph framework to formalize compositional reasoning in language models, defining three increasing levels of compositionality. Using data‑structure tasks with deterministic rewards, the authors observe a consistent asymmetry: training on decomposed skills does not reliably transfer to composed tasks, whereas training on composed tasks transfers more readily to decomposed ones. They provide a theoretical explanation for this asymmetry and evaluate its effects under length extrapolation, structural distribution shift, and transfer to unseen skills, concluding with a pilot study on real‑world tool‑calling benchmarks that suggests the phenomenon extends to practical settings.
By Yu He, Yingxi Li, Yifei Wang, Ellen Vitercik
The paper introduces TPR-Attention, an attention mechanism that operates over tensor‑product representations to embed structured inductive bias into deep learning models. Experiments on compositional tasks demonstrate that TPR‑Attention outperforms existing architectural components in achieving combinatorial generalization. The results suggest that incorporating explicit compositional structure into neural attention can improve systematic generalization.
By Melisa Civeleko\u{g}lu, Isabeau Pr\'emont-Schwarz