| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generalize compositional models fail to generalise from small datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-general and model-agnostic formulation of compositionality as a constraint on symmetries of data distributions rather than models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure matches or surpasses state-of-the-art, task-specific models on COGS semantic parsing, SCAN and Alchemy instruction following, and CLEVR-CoGenT visual question answering datasets. |
Similar Papers
Good-Enough Compositional Data Augmentation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a proposed data augmentation protocol provides a compositional inductive bias in conditional and unconditional sequence models. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation protocol that provides a compositional inductive bias in conditional and unconditional sequence models by replacing discontinuous fragments with other fragments that appear in at least one similar environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol reduces error rate by 87% on diagnostic tasks and 16% on semantic parsing tasks. |
Align and Augment: Generative Data Augmentation for Compositional Generalization (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on semantic parsing has shown that seq2seq models find compositional generalization challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-augmentation strategy that exploits alignment annotations between sentences and their corresponding meaning representations to improve compositional generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves compositional generalization performance by exploiting alignment annotations between sentences and their corresponding meaning representations. |
Improving Compositional Generalization with Latent Structure and Data Augmentation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Generic unstructured neural networks struggle on out-of-distribution compositional generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to recombinate examples from a model called Compositional Structure Learner and add them to a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is even stronger than a T5-CSL ensemble on two real world compositional generalization tasks. |
Quantifying Compositionality of Classic and State-of-the-Art Embeddings (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Static word embeddings make strong claims about compositionality, but the SOTA generative models go too far in the other direction. |
| Approach: | a new study evaluates the compositionality of word embeddings by canonical correlation analysis . strong compositional signals are observed in later training stages across data modalities . |
| Outcome: | a new evaluation of compositional models shows that they exploit access meanings when justified . strong compositional signals are observed in later training stages and in deeper layers of the transformer-based model before a decline at the top layer. |
The Paradox of the Compositionality of Natural Language: A Neural Machine Translation Case Study (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Obtaining human-like performance in NLP is often argued to require compositional generalisation. |
| Approach: | They re-instantiate three compositionality tests from the literature and reformulate them for neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are more compositional than models trained on more data, the authors show . they also show that some non-compositional behaviours are mistakes, whereas others reflect natural variation in data. |
Combine to Describe: Evaluating Compositional Generalization in Image Captioning (2022.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on compositionality has focused on the ability to combine simpler concepts to understand & generate arbitrarily more complex conceptual structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a set of image captioning models to benchmark their compositional generalization properties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models do not generalize in terms of systematicity and productivity, but are robust to synonym substitutions. |
Syntax-guided Neural Module Distillation to Probe Compositionality in Sentence Embeddings (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Past work on sentence embedding models faces issues determining the causal impact of implicit syntax representations. |
| Approach: | They construct a neural module net based on a transformer model and train it end-to-end to approximate the sentence’s embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures whether syntax is a strong model of its compositional ability. |
Compositional Networks Enable Systematic Generalization for Grounded Language Understanding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that deep networks can mimic some human language abilities when presented with novel sentences . a general-purpose mechanism that enables agents to generalize their language understanding to compositional domains is critical to building safe and fair robots, says a new study. |
| Approach: | They build a general-purpose mechanism that enables agents to generalize their language understanding to compositional domains. |
| Outcome: | a new network generalizes its language understanding to compositional domains while generalizing its knowledge when prior work does not. |
Your Language Model May Think Too Rigidly: Achieving Reasoning Consistency with Symmetry-Enhanced Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Yihang Yao, Zhepeng Cen, Miao Li, William Han, Yuyou Zhang, Emerson Liu, Zuxin Liu, Chuang Gan, Ding Zhao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that enhances LLMs’ awareness of symmetry in query variations and propose syMmetry-ENhanceD (MEND) data augmentation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on logical and arithmetic reasoning tasks show that the proposed approach improves model robustness at the knowledge extraction stage through query augmentation. |
Compositional Generalization by Factorizing Alignment and Translation (2020.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | a crucial property underlying the expressive power of human language is its systematicity. |
| Approach: | They propose to make an analogous separation between alignment and translation in neural machine translation to capture compositional structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing neural networks on a compositional generalization task without supervision. |