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Neural networks have in recent years shown promise for helping software engineers write programs and even formally verify them. While semantic information plays a crucial part in these processes, it remains unclear to what degree popular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Shizhuo Dylan Zhang , Curt Tigges , Stella Biderman , Maxim Raginsky , Talia Ringer

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

Compositional generalization is one of the main properties which differentiates lexical learning in humans from state-of-art neural networks. We propose a general framework for building models that can generalize compositionally using the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Mircea Petrache , Shubhendu Trivedi

When trained on language data, do transformers learn some arbitrary computation that utilizes the full capacity of the architecture or do they learn a simpler, tree-like computation, hypothesized to underlie compositional meaning systems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Shikhar Murty , Pratyusha Sharma , Jacob Andreas , Christopher D. Manning

We analyze the grounded SCAN (gSCAN) benchmark, which was recently proposed to study systematic generalization for grounded language understanding. First, we study which aspects of the original benchmark can be solved by commonly used…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Linlu Qiu , Hexiang Hu , Bowen Zhang , Peter Shaw , Fei Sha

Transformers have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance on compositional problems remains a topic of debate. In this work, we investigate the mechanisms of how transformers behave on unseen compositional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Zhongwang Zhang , Pengxiao Lin , Zhiwei Wang , Yaoyu Zhang , Zhi-Qin John Xu

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

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, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Kensen Shi , Joey Hong , Yinlin Deng , Pengcheng Yin , Manzil Zaheer , Charles Sutton

Transformers demonstrate impressive performance on a range of reasoning benchmarks. To evaluate the degree to which these abilities are a result of actual reasoning, existing work has focused on developing sophisticated benchmarks for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jannik Brinkmann , Abhay Sheshadri , Victor Levoso , Paul Swoboda , Christian Bartelt

In this contribution, we demonstrate that Graph Neural Networks and Transformers can learn to reason about geometric constraints. We train them to predict spatial position of points in a discrete 2D grid from a set of constraints that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jan Hůla , David Mojžíšek , Jiří Janeček , David Herel , Mikoláš Janota

The ability to reason lies at the core of artificial intelligence (AI), and challenging problems usually call for deeper and longer reasoning to tackle. A crucial question about AI reasoning is whether models can extrapolate learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yu Huang , Zixin Wen , Aarti Singh , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

In complex inferential tasks like question answering, machine learning models must confront two challenges: the need to implement a compositional reasoning process, and, in many applications, the need for this reasoning process to be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Ronghang Hu , Jacob Andreas , Trevor Darrell , Kate Saenko

It is well understood that different neural network architectures are suited to different tasks, but is there always a single best architecture for a given task? We compare the expressive power of transformers, RNNs, and transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Gilad Yehudai , Noah Amsel , Joan Bruna

Compositional and relational learning is a hallmark of human intelligence, but one which presents challenges for neural models. One difficulty in the development of such models is the lack of benchmarks with clear compositional and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Tim Klinger , Dhaval Adjodah , Vincent Marois , Josh Joseph , Matthew Riemer , Alex 'Sandy' Pentland , Murray Campbell

Compositional generalization remains a foundational weakness of modern neural networks, limiting their robustness and applicability in domains requiring out-of-distribution reasoning. A central, yet unverified, assumption in neuro-symbolic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Mahnoor Shahid , Hannes Rothe

Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This…

Humans understand new combinations of words encountered if they are combinations of words recognized from different contexts, an ability called Compositional Generalization. The COGS benchmark (Kim and Linzen, 2020) arXiv:2010.05465 reports…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 William Bruns

We investigate the ability of decoder-only transformer models to perform abstract symbolic reasoning; specifically solving propositional logic reasoning problems given in-context. Previous work demonstrated that models fail to generalize to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Nevena Lazić , Liam Fowl , András György , Csaba Szepesvári

Natural language exhibits patterns of hierarchically governed dependencies, in which relations between words are sensitive to syntactic structure rather than linear ordering. While re-current network models often fail to generalize in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Jackson Petty , Robert Frank

Large-scale transformers achieve impressive results on program synthesis benchmarks, yet their true generalization capabilities remain obscured by data contamination and opaque training corpora. To rigorously assess whether models are truly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Henrik Voigt , Michael Habeck , Joachim Giesen