English

Do Deep Neural Networks Capture Compositionality in Arithmetic Reasoning?

Computation and Language 2023-02-16 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Compositionality is a pivotal property of symbolic reasoning. However, how well recent neural models capture compositionality remains underexplored in the symbolic reasoning tasks. This study empirically addresses this question by systematically examining recently published pre-trained seq2seq models with a carefully controlled dataset of multi-hop arithmetic symbolic reasoning. We introduce a skill tree on compositionality in arithmetic symbolic reasoning that defines the hierarchical levels of complexity along with three compositionality dimensions: systematicity, productivity, and substitutivity. Our experiments revealed that among the three types of composition, the models struggled most with systematicity, performing poorly even with relatively simple compositions. That difficulty was not resolved even after training the models with intermediate reasoning steps.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.07866,
  title  = {Do Deep Neural Networks Capture Compositionality in Arithmetic Reasoning?},
  author = {Keito Kudo and Yoichi Aoki and Tatsuki Kuribayashi and Ana Brassard and Masashi Yoshikawa and Keisuke Sakaguchi and Kentaro Inui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.07866},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

accepted by EACL 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:41:04.089Z