Papers with SCAN
LexSym: Compositionality as Lexical Symmetry (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Revisiting the Compositional Generalization Abilities of Neural Sequence Models (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have suggested that standard seq-to-seq models lack the ability to generalize compositionally. |
| Approach: | They propose to use one-shot primitive generalization as introduced by the popular SCAN benchmark to modify the training distribution in simple and intuitive ways to achieve near-perfect generalization performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves near-perfect generalization performance despite a lack of training data . |
The Devil is in the Detail: Simple Tricks Improve Systematic Generalization of Transformers (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that basic configurations can improve the performance of neural networks on systematic generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose to revisit basic configurations to improve the performance of Transformers on systematic generalization by revisiting scaling of embeddings, early stopping, relative positional embeddment, and Universal Transformer variants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve accuracy from 50% to 85% on the PCFG productivity split and from 35% to 81% on COGS. |
Systematic Generalization on gSCAN with Language Conditioned Embedding (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models fail when the test set is systematically different from the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that explicitly models the relations between objects in their contexts while learning their representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model and reaches state-of-the-art performance on grounded SCAN (gSCAN), a grounded natural language navigation dataset. |
Detecting Compositionally Out-of-Distribution Examples in Semantic Parsing (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Neural network models suffer from performance losses when faced with compositionally out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use neural semantic parsers to detect compositionally out-of-distribution (OOD) data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well on the standard SCAN and CFQ datasets. |
Span-based Semantic Parsing for Compositional Generalization (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite success of sequence-to-sequence models, they fail in compositional generalization . a span-based parser that predicts a utterance over spans improves performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based parser that predicts a utterance over a given span tree . they propose to use CKY to encode how partial programs compose over spans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on random splits than baselines that require compositional generalization. |
SCAN: Semantic Document Layout Analysis for Textual and Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent research indicates that using VLMs yields better RAG performance, but processing rich documents remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a VLM-friendly approach that enhances both textual and visual RAG systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms conventional methods and commercial document processing solutions. |
SCAN: Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on approximating model rankings, but such benchmarks fail to provide users and developers with a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of a specific model’s capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables detailed characterization of LLM capabilities through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables detailed characterization of large language models through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. |
Reducing Spurious Correlations for Answer Selection by Feature Decorrelation and Language Debiasing (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep neural models rely on spurious correlations between prediction labels and input features, which in general suffer from robustness and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature decorrelation module to remove feature dependencies and reduce spurious correlations by learning a weight for each instance at the training phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the robustness of the neural ANswer selection models from the sample and feature perspectives. |
Scientific and Creative Analogies in Pretrained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing analogy datasets focus on a limited set of analogical relations with a high similarity of the two domains between which the analogy holds. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that encodes analogy in pretrained language models . they use a system that maps attributes and relational structures across dissimilar domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that state-of-the-art models achieve low performance on analogy tasks . |
Learning to Substitute Spans towards Improving Compositional Generalization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite the rising prevalence of neural sequence models, there is a deficiency in compositional generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional augmentation strategy that enables multi-grained composition of substructures in the whole training set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms existing strategies on three compositional generalization benchmarks. |
Systematic Generalization on gSCAN: What is Nearly Solved and What is Next? (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a general-purpose Transformer-based model with crossmodal attention solves most of the systematic generalization problems . current models are data inefficient given the narrow scope of commands in gSCAN . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Transformer-based model with cross-modal attention to solve gSCAN . they propose to generate data to incorporate relations between objects in the visual environment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms specialized approaches on most splits, and is data inefficient given the narrow scope of commands. |
Recursive Top-Down Production for Sentence Generation with Latent Trees (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Various studies have shown that incorporating syntactic structures into recursive encoders can be beneficial for various natural language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic programming algorithm that marginalises over latent binary tree structures with N leaves to train a recursive neural function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous models on the LENGTH split and English question formation tasks on the Multi30k dataset. |
CNNs found to jump around more skillfully than RNNs: Compositional Generalization in Seq2seq Convolutional Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent deep neural network successes rekindled debates on their natural language processing abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to test the ability of sequence-to-sequence networks to perform systematic, compositional generalization of linguistic rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that convolutional networks perform better on compositional generalization tasks than RNNs. |
TreeMix: Compositional Constituency-based Data Augmentation for Natural Language Understanding (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation methods miss the important characteristic of compositionality, meaning of a complex expression is built from its sub-parts. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional data augmentation approach for natural language understanding called TreeMix that leverages constituency parsing tree to decompose sentences into constituent sub-structures and the Mixup data enhancing technique to recombine them to generate new sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on text classification and SCAN. |
Equivariant Transduction through Invariant Alignment (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that NLP models possess the ability to generalize compositionally, but none have tested it. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a group-equivariant neural network to encode an inductive bias for SCAN to test for this ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing group-equivariant approaches on the SCAN task and shows that it can generalize compositionally. |
Sequence-Level Mixed Sample Data Augmentation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Despite their empirical success, neural networks still have difficulty capturing compositional aspects of natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation approach to encourage compositional behavior in neural networks . they propose to softly combine input/output sequences from the training set . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields 1.0 BLEU improvement on translation datasets over baselines. |
CTL++: Evaluating Generalization on Never-Seen Compositional Patterns of Known Functions, and Compatibility of Neural Representations (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural nets fail to generalize systematically due to superficial differences in training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new diagnostic dataset based on compositions of unary symbolic functions that tests systematicity of NNs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that recent CTL-solving Transformer variants fail on CTL++. |
PersonaLM: Language Model Personalization via Domain-distributed Span Aggregated K-Nearest N-gram Retrieval Augmentation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing language modeling tools for automatic speech recognition (ASR) are difficult to personalize. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-distributed Span-Aggregated K-nearest N-gram retrieval augmentation to improve language modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR) personalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on Wikitext-103, UserLibri, and ASAP datasets with a 10-16% improvement in perplexity and a 5-8% reduction in word error rates. |
Mutual Exclusivity Training and Primitive Augmentation to Induce Compositionality (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent datasets expose the lack of systematic generalization ability in standard sequence-to-sequence models. |
| Approach: | They propose two techniques to address the lack of systematic generalization ability in standard sequence-to-sequence models by mutual exclusivity training and prim2primX data augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve on two widely-used compositionality datasets. |
Data Factors for Better Compositional Generalization (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent diagnostic datasets on compositional generalization expose severe problems . state-of-the-art models trained on larger and more general datasets show better generalization ability . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical analysis by training Transformer models on a variety of training sets with different data factors including dataset scale, pattern complexity, example difficulty, etc. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model training on larger datasets improves on compositional generalization tasks. |
Towards Understanding the Relationship between In-context Learning and Compositional Generalization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning is an inductive bias for compositional generalization, but many deep neural architectures struggle with this ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to force a causal Transformer to in-context learn to promote compositional generalization by using earlier examples to generalize to later ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can solve 'ordinary' learning problems by utilizing earlier examples to generalize to later ones, i.e., in-context learning. |