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Contemporary neural networks still fall short of human-level generalization, which extends far beyond our direct experiences. In this paper, we argue that the underlying cause for this shortcoming is their inability to dynamically and…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Klaus Greff , Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Compositionality is believed to be fundamental to intelligence. In humans, it underlies the structure of thought, language, and higher-level reasoning. In AI, compositional representations can enable a powerful form of out-of-distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Eric Elmoznino , Thomas Jiralerspong , Yoshua Bengio , Guillaume Lajoie

Compositionality has long been considered a key explanatory property underlying human intelligence: arbitrary concepts can be composed into novel complex combinations, permitting the acquisition of an open ended, potentially infinite…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Jacob Russin , Sam Whitman McGrath , Danielle J. Williams

Compositional generalization (the ability to respond correctly to novel combinations of familiar components) is thought to be a cornerstone of intelligent behavior. Compositionally structured (e.g. disentangled) representations support this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Samuel Lippl , Kim Stachenfeld

The ability to learn and compose functions is foundational to efficient learning and reasoning in humans, enabling flexible generalizations such as creating new dishes from known cooking processes. Beyond sequential chaining of functions,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Yanli Zhou , Brenden M. Lake , Adina Williams

Humans readily generalize, applying prior knowledge to novel situations and stimuli. Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence have begun to approximate and even surpass human performance, but machine systems reliably…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Leonidas A. A. Doumas , Guillermo Puebla , Andrea E. Martin

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

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

Humans flexibly solve new problems that differ qualitatively from those they were trained on. This ability to generalize is supported by learned concepts that capture structure common across different problems. Here we develop a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Lucas Y. Tian , Kevin Ellis , Marta Kryven , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Emily Cheng , Mathieu Rita , Thierry Poibeau

Humans are highly efficient learners, with the ability to grasp the meaning of a new concept from just a few examples. Unlike popular computer vision systems, humans can flexibly leverage the compositional structure of the visual world,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Yanli Zhou , Brenden M. Lake

Circuits in the brain commonly exhibit modular architectures that factorise complex tasks, resulting in the ability to compositionally generalise and reduce catastrophic forgetting. In contrast, artificial neural networks (ANNs) appear to…

Biological Physics · Physics 2025-12-17 Daoyuan Qian , Qiyao Liang , Ila Fiete

We describe a procedure for explaining neurons in deep representations by identifying compositional logical concepts that closely approximate neuron behavior. Compared to prior work that uses atomic labels as explanations, analyzing neurons…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Jesse Mu , Jacob Andreas

One of the key limitations of modern deep learning approaches lies in the amount of data required to train them. Humans, by contrast, can learn to recognize novel categories from just a few examples. Instrumental to this rapid learning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Pavel Tokmakov , Yu-Xiong Wang , Martial Hebert

Compositional generalization refers to the ability to generalize to novel combinations of previously observed words and syntactic structures. Since it is regarded as a desired property of neural models, recent work has assessed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Ryoma Kumon , Daiki Matsuoka , Hitomi Yanaka

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

Transformers can under some circumstances generalize to novel problem instances whose constituent parts might have been encountered during training, but whose compositions have not. What mechanisms underlie this ability for compositional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Simon Schug , Seijin Kobayashi , Yassir Akram , João Sacramento , Razvan Pascanu

Compositional generalization is a key ability of humans that enables us to learn new concepts from only a handful examples. Neural machine learning models, including the now ubiquitous Transformers, struggle to generalize in this way, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Tim Klinger , Luke Liu , Soham Dan , Maxwell Crouse , Parikshit Ram , Alexander Gray

Humans are remarkably flexible when understanding new sentences that include combinations of concepts they have never encountered before. Recent work has shown that while deep networks can mimic some human language abilities when presented…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Yen-Ling Kuo , Boris Katz , Andrei Barbu

Humans leverage compositionality to efficiently learn new concepts, understanding how familiar parts can combine together to form novel objects. In contrast, popular computer vision models struggle to make the same types of inferences,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Yanli Zhou , Reuben Feinman , Brenden M. Lake