Related papers: When can transformers compositionally generalize i…
Transformer models can use two fundamentally different kinds of information: information stored in weights during training, and information provided ``in-context'' at inference time. In this work, we show that transformers exhibit different…
Compositional generalization is the ability of a model to generalize to complex, previously unseen types of combinations of entities from just having seen the primitives. This type of generalization is particularly relevant to the semantic…
A common practice in large language model (LLM) usage for complex analytical tasks such as code generation, is to sample a solution for the entire task within the model's context window. Previous works have shown that subtask decomposition…
In recent years, it has been shown empirically that standard disentangled latent variable models do not support robust compositional learning in the visual domain. Indeed, in spite of being designed with the goal of factorising datasets…
We present a differentiable framework capable of learning a wide variety of compositions of simple policies that we call skills. By recursively composing skills with themselves, we can create hierarchies that display complex behavior. Skill…
Modern semantic parsers suffer from two principal limitations. First, training requires expensive collection of utterance-program pairs. Second, semantic parsers fail to generalize at test time to new compositions/structures that have not…
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…
Algorithmic generalization in machine learning refers to the ability to learn the underlying algorithm that generates data in a way that generalizes out-of-distribution. This is generally considered a difficult task for most machine…
Neural networks have revolutionized language modeling and excelled in various downstream tasks. However, the extent to which these models achieve compositional generalization comparable to human cognitive abilities remains a topic of…
Image captioning has focused on generalizing to images drawn from the same distribution as the training set, and not to the more challenging problem of generalizing to different distributions of images. Recently, Nikolaus et al. (2019)…
Learning structural information from observational data is central to producing new knowledge outside the training corpus. This holds for mechanistic understanding in scientific discovery as well as flexible test-time compositional…
Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling us to solve new problems by transferring knowledge from one situation to another. Yet, developing artificial intelligence systems capable of robust human-like analogical…
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…
Systematic generalization refers to the capacity to understand and generate novel combinations from known components. Despite recent progress by large language models (LLMs) across various domains, these models often fail to extend their…
One of the key factors in language productivity and human cognition is the ability of systematic compositionality, which refers to understanding composed unseen examples of seen primitives. However, recent evidence reveals that the…
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,…
A fundamental question in interpretability research is to what extent neural networks, particularly language models, implement reusable functions through subnetworks that can be composed to perform more complex tasks. Recent advances in…
A longstanding question in cognitive science concerns the learning mechanisms underlying compositionality in human cognition. Humans can infer the structured relationships (e.g., grammatical rules) implicit in their sensory observations…
A major challenge for transformers is generalizing to sequences longer than those observed during training. While previous works have empirically shown that transformers can either succeed or fail at length generalization depending on the…
Deep tabular modelling increasingly relies on in-context learning where, during inference, a model receives a set of $(x,y)$ pairs as context and predicts labels for new inputs without weight updates. We challenge the prevailing view that…