REVIEW 8 cited by
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Compositionality decomposed: how do neural networks generalise?
read the original abstract
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 compositional. As a response to this controversy, we present a set of tests that provide a bridge between, on the one hand, the vast amount of linguistic and philosophical theory about compositionality of language and, on the other, the successful neural models of language. We collect different interpretations of compositionality and translate them into five theoretically grounded tests for models that are formulated on a task-independent level. In particular, we provide tests to investigate (i) if models systematically recombine known parts and rules (ii) if models can extend their predictions beyond the length they have seen in the training data (iii) if models' composition operations are local or global (iv) if models' predictions are robust to synonym substitutions and (v) if models favour rules or exceptions during training. To demonstrate the usefulness of this evaluation paradigm, we instantiate these five tests on a highly compositional data set which we dub PCFG SET and apply the resulting tests to three popular sequence-to-sequence models: a recurrent, a convolution-based and a transformer model. We provide an in-depth analysis of the results, which uncover the strengths and weaknesses of these three architectures and point to potential areas of improvement.
Forward citations
Cited by 8 Pith papers
-
From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability
Compositional interpretability defines explanations as commuting syntactic-semantic mapping pairs grounded in compositionality and minimum description length, with compressive refinement and a parsimony theorem guaran...
-
From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability
The paper introduces compositional interpretability as a category-theoretic framework that casts mechanistic explanations as commuting syntactic-semantic mappings optimized under faithfulness and complexity constraint...
-
Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling
Autoregressive transformers follow power-law scaling laws for cross-entropy loss with nearly universal exponents relating optimal model size to compute budget across four domains.
-
Arithmetic Pedagogy for Language Models
A small GPT-2 model trained from scratch on GASING-derived CoT supervision for arithmetic reaches over 80% held-out accuracy, exhibits three learning phases, and develops both procedural and associative reasoning.
-
How Do Language Models Compose Functions?
LLMs solve compositional factual recall either by computing intermediates or directly, with mechanism choice correlated to translation geometry in embedding spaces.
-
Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know
Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.
-
A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment
Ranked preference modeling outperforms imitation learning for language model alignment and scales more favorably with model size.
-
Scaling Laws for Transfer
Effective data transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning is described by a power law in model parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size, acting like a multiplier on the fine-tuning data.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.