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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

Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Songtao Lu , Xiaodong Cui , Pin-Yu Chen

Systematic generalization is the ability to combine known parts into novel meaning; an important aspect of efficient human learning, but a weakness of neural network learning. In this work, we investigate how two well-known modeling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Laura Ruis , Brenden Lake

Compositional understanding is crucial for human intelligence, yet it remains unclear whether contemporary vision models exhibit it. The dominant machine learning paradigm is built on the premise that scaling data and model sizes will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Arnas Uselis , Andrea Dittadi , Seong Joon Oh

This work examines the presence of modularity in pre-trained Transformers, a feature commonly found in human brains and thought to be vital for general intelligence. In analogy to human brains, we consider two main characteristics of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Zhengyan Zhang , Zhiyuan Zeng , Yankai Lin , Chaojun Xiao , Xiaozhi Wang , Xu Han , Zhiyuan Liu , Ruobing Xie , Maosong Sun , Jie Zhou

In tasks like semantic parsing, instruction following, and question answering, standard deep networks fail to generalize compositionally from small datasets. Many existing approaches overcome this limitation with model architectures that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Ekin Akyürek , Jacob Andreas

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Philipp Hellwig , Willem Zuidema , Claire E. Stevenson , Martha Lewis

This study aims to understand how statistical biases affect the model's ability to generalize to in-distribution and out-of-distribution data on algorithmic tasks. Prior research indicates that transformers may inadvertently learn to rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 John Mitros

Transformer network architecture has proven effective in speech enhancement. However, as its core module, self-attention suffers from quadratic complexity, making it infeasible for training on long speech utterances. In practical scenarios,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-10 Qiquan Zhang , Hongxu Zhu , Xinyuan Qian , Eliathamby Ambikairajah , Haizhou Li

A key feature of human intelligence is the ability to generalize beyond the training distribution, for instance, parsing longer sentences than seen in the past. Currently, deep neural networks struggle to generalize robustly to such shifts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Soham Dan , Osbert Bastani , Dan Roth

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

Obtaining compositional mappings is important for the model to generalize well compositionally. To better understand when and how to encourage the model to learn such mappings, we study their uniqueness through different perspectives.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Yi Ren , Danica J. Sutherland

Despite the recent progress in deep learning and reinforcement learning, transfer and generalization of skills learned on specific tasks is very limited compared to human (or animal) intelligence. The lifelong, incremental building of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-10 Louis Annabi

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

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great success in computer vision, approaching human-level performance when trained for specific tasks via application-specific loss functions. In this paper, we propose a method for augmenting…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-15 Austin Stone , Huayan Wang , Michael Stark , Yi Liu , D. Scott Phoenix , Dileep George

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

Prior work has shown that text-conditioned diffusion models can learn to identify and manipulate primitive concepts underlying a compositional data-generating process, enabling generalization to entirely novel, out-of-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Yongyi Yang , Core Francisco Park , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Maya Okawa , Wei Hu , Hidenori Tanaka

Text classification is one of the most widely studied tasks in natural language processing. Motivated by the principle of compositionality, large multilayer neural network models have been employed for this task in an attempt to effectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Devendra Singh Sachan , Manzil Zaheer , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Much attention has been devoted recently to the generalization puzzle in deep learning: large, deep networks can generalize well, but existing theories bounding generalization error are exceedingly loose, and thus cannot explain this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-08 Andrew K. Lampinen , Surya Ganguli

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