Complexity Induction: Compositional Generalization via Structured Training Distortion
Read the original on arXiv AI →The paper introduces "complexity induction," a method that distorts training data in a structured way to promote compositional generalization in a standard CNN without changing its architecture. Using synthetic images of colored geometric shapes, the authors encode classes as flat string labels (e.g., "red‑circle") and deliberately omit certain color‑shape combinations from training. Two distortion techniques—mixed labels (soft target distributions based on Jaccard similarity) and expanded dataset (false samples with incorrect labels)—both enable the model to predict unseen class combinations, with mixed labels leveraging the CNN’s embedding structure and expanded training improving embedding factorization. A control experiment with random false labels shows that the effect relies on the structured nature of the distortion rather than noise alone.
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