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Humans can systematically generalize to novel compositions of existing concepts. Recent studies argue that neural networks appear inherently ineffective in such cognitive capacity, leading to a pessimistic view and a lack of attention to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Ning Shi , Boxin Wang , Wei Wang , Xiangyu Liu , Zhouhan Lin

Unsupervised on-the-fly back-translation, in conjunction with multilingual pretraining, is the dominant method for unsupervised neural machine translation. Theoretically, however, the method should not work in general. We therefore conduct…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Nicolas Guerin , Shane Steinert-Threlkeld , Emmanuel Chemla

Neural network models often generalize poorly to mismatched domains or distributions. In NLP, this issue arises in particular when models are expected to generalize compositionally, that is, to novel combinations of familiar words and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Wang Zhu , Peter Shaw , Tal Linzen , Fei Sha

Natural language is compositional; the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of its parts. This property allows humans to create and interpret novel sentences, generalizing robustly outside their prior experience. Neural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Henry Conklin , Bailin Wang , Kenny Smith , Ivan Titov

When writing programs, people have the ability to tackle a new complex task by decomposing it into smaller and more familiar subtasks. While it is difficult to measure whether neural program synthesis methods have similar capabilities, what…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Kensen Shi , Joey Hong , Manzil Zaheer , Pengcheng Yin , Charles Sutton

Compositional generalization is a troubling blind spot for neural language models. Recent efforts have presented techniques for improving a model's ability to encode novel combinations of known inputs, but less work has focused on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Matthew Setzler , Scott Howland , Lauren Phillips

Compositional generalization is a basic mechanism in human language learning, which current neural networks struggle with. A recently proposed Disentangled sequence-to-sequence model (Dangle) shows promising generalization capability by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Hao Zheng , Mirella Lapata

The compositional generalization abilities of neural models have been sought after for human-like linguistic competence. The popular method to evaluate such abilities is to assess the models' input-output behavior. However, that does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Ryoma Kumon , Hitomi Yanaka

Compositional generalization refers to correctly interpret novel combinations of known primitives, which remains a major challenge. Existing approaches often rely on supervised fine-tuning, which encourages models to imitate target outputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiyan Fu , Wei Liu

We propose iteratively prompting a large language model to self-correct a translation, with inspiration from their strong language understanding and translation capability as well as a human-like translation approach. Interestingly,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Pinzhen Chen , Zhicheng Guo , Barry Haddow , Kenneth Heafield

Compositional generalization -- the ability to understand and generate novel combinations of learned concepts -- enables models to extend their capabilities beyond limited experiences. While effective, the data structures and principles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Lingjing Kong , Shaoan Xie , Yang Jiao , Yetian Chen , Yanhui Guo , Simone Shao , Yan Gao , Guangyi Chen , Kun Zhang

According to the principle of compositional generalization, the meaning of a complex expression can be understood as a function of the meaning of its parts and of how they are combined. This principle is crucial for human language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Sungjun Han , Sebastian Padó

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have achieved competitive performance in standard benchmarks. However, they have recently been shown to suffer limitation in compositional generalization, failing to effectively learn the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Yongjing Yin , Yafu Li , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Yue Zhang

A fundamental characteristic common to both human vision and natural language is their compositional nature. Yet, despite the performance gains contributed by large vision and language pretraining, recent investigations find that most-if…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Chenhao Zheng , Jieyu Zhang , Aniruddha Kembhavi , Ranjay Krishna

Transformers trained on huge text corpora exhibit a remarkable set of capabilities, e.g., performing basic arithmetic. Given the inherent compositional nature of language, one can expect the model to learn to compose these capabilities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Rahul Ramesh , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Mikail Khona , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka

Compositional generalization is the capacity to recognize and imagine a large amount of novel combinations from known components. It is a key in human intelligence, but current neural networks generally lack such ability. This report…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Yuanpeng Li

Seq2seq models have been shown to struggle with compositional generalization in semantic parsing, i.e. generalizing to unseen compositions of phenomena that the model handles correctly in isolation. We phrase semantic parsing as a two-step…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Matthias Lindemann , Alexander Koller , Ivan Titov

A generally intelligent learner should generalize to more complex tasks than it has previously encountered, but the two common paradigms in machine learning -- either training a separate learner per task or training a single learner for all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-09 Michael B. Chang , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine , Thomas L. Griffiths

Compositional generalization-a key open challenge in modern machine learning-requires models to predict unknown combinations of known concepts. However, assessing compositional generalization remains a fundamental challenge due to the lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Giacomo Camposampiero , Pietro Barbiero , Michael Hersche , Roger Wattenhofer , Abbas Rahimi

Contrarily to humans who have the ability to recombine familiar expressions to create novel ones, modern neural networks struggle to do so. This has been emphasized recently with the introduction of the benchmark dataset "gSCAN" (Ruis et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-02 Christina Heinze-Deml , Diane Bouchacourt