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Related papers: Understanding Simplicity Bias towards Compositiona…

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Compositionality is a key strategy for addressing combinatorial complexity and the curse of dimensionality. Recent work has shown that compositional solutions can be learned and offer substantial gains across a variety of domains, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-30 Clemens Rosenbaum , Ignacio Cases , Matthew Riemer , Tim Klinger

Learning compositional representation is a key aspect of object-centric learning as it enables flexible systematic generalization and supports complex visual reasoning. However, most of the existing approaches rely on auto-encoding…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Whie Jung , Jaehoon Yoo , Sungjin Ahn , Seunghoon Hong

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

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

The ability of deep neural networks to generalise well even when they interpolate their training data has been explained using various "simplicity biases". These theories postulate that neural networks avoid overfitting by first learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-29 Maria Refinetti , Alessandro Ingrosso , Sebastian Goldt

Many tasks in control, robotics, and planning can be specified using desired goal configurations for various entities in the environment. Learning goal-conditioned policies is a natural paradigm to solve such tasks. However, current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Allan Zhou , Vikash Kumar , Chelsea Finn , Aravind Rajeswaran

Despite the rising prevalence of neural sequence models, recent empirical evidences suggest their deficiency in compositional generalization. One of the current de-facto solutions to this problem is compositional data augmentation, aiming…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Zhaoyi Li , Ying Wei , Defu Lian

Simplicity bias, the propensity of deep models to over-rely on simple features, has been identified as a potential reason for limited out-of-distribution generalization of neural networks (Shah et al., 2020). Despite the important…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-08 Nikita Tsoy , Nikola Konstantinov

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

Many dynamical systems -- from robots interacting with their surroundings to large-scale multiphysics systems -- involve a number of interacting subsystems. Toward the objective of learning composite models of such systems from data, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Cyrus Neary , Ufuk Topcu

Numerous models for grounded language understanding have been recently proposed, including (i) generic models that can be easily adapted to any given task and (ii) intuitively appealing modular models that require background knowledge to be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-23 Dzmitry Bahdanau , Shikhar Murty , Michael Noukhovitch , Thien Huu Nguyen , Harm de Vries , Aaron Courville

Deep networks often exhibit a preference for "simple" solutions, and such a simplicity bias is widely believed to play a key role in generalization. Yet a broadly applicable, quantitative measure of simplicity remains elusive. We introduce…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Tianren Zhang , Xiangxin Li , Minghao Xiao , Guanyu Chen , Feng Chen

It is known that, without awareness of the process, our brain appears to focus on the general shape of objects rather than superficial statistics of context. On the other hand, learning autonomously allows discovering invariant regularities…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-03-31 Nader Asadi , Amir M. Sarfi , Mehrdad Hosseinzadeh , Zahra Karimpour , Mahdi Eftekhari

Recent diagnostic datasets on compositional generalization, such as SCAN (Lake and Baroni, 2018) and COGS (Kim and Linzen, 2020), expose severe problems in models trained from scratch on these datasets. However, in contrast to this poor…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Xiang Zhou , Yichen Jiang , Mohit Bansal

Despite a multitude of empirical studies, little consensus exists on whether neural networks are able to generalise compositionally, a controversy that, in part, stems from a lack of agreement about what it means for a neural model to be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Dieuwke Hupkes , Verna Dankers , Mathijs Mul , Elia Bruni

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Jacob Russin , Roland Fernandez , Hamid Palangi , Eric Rosen , Nebojsa Jojic , Paul Smolensky , Jianfeng Gao

Recent works have demonstrated that neural networks exhibit extreme simplicity bias(SB). That is, they learn only the simplest features to solve a task at hand, even in the presence of other, more robust but more complex features. Due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Depen Morwani , Jatin Batra , Prateek Jain , Praneeth Netrapalli

Though modern neural networks have achieved impressive performance in both vision and language tasks, we know little about the functions that they implement. One possibility is that neural networks implicitly break down complex tasks into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Michael A. Lepori , Thomas Serre , Ellie Pavlick

Why depth yields a genuine computational advantage over shallow methods remains a central open question in learning theory. We study this question in a controlled high-dimensional Gaussian setting, focusing on compositional target…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-12 Hugo Tabanelli , Yatin Dandi , Luca Pesce , Florent Krzakala

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