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Benchmarking Compositionality with Formal Languages

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arxiv 2208.08195 v3 pith:LI3WOIS2 submitted 2022-08-17 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords compositionalityformallanguageslearnabilitymodelsneuralpropertiestransducers
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Recombining known primitive concepts into larger novel combinations is a quintessentially human cognitive capability. Whether large neural models in NLP can acquire this ability while learning from data is an open question. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the perspective of formal languages. We use deterministic finite-state transducers to make an unbounded number of datasets with controllable properties governing compositionality. By randomly sampling over many transducers, we explore which of their properties contribute to learnability of a compositional relation by a neural network. We find that the models either learn the relations completely or not at all. The key is transition coverage, setting a soft learnability limit at 400 examples per transition.

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  1. Randomly Sampled Language Reasoning Problems Elucidate Limitations of In-Context Learning

    cs.LG 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    On randomly sampled 3-state DFA language tasks, foundation LLMs underperform n-gram baselines under pure in-context-learning prompts.

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