Authors
Ivan Vegner
Sydelle de Souza
Valentin Forch
Martha Lewis
Leonidas A.A. Doumas
Date (dd-mm-yyyy)
2025
Title
Behavioural vs. Representational Systematicity in End-to-End Models
Subtitle
An Opinionated Survey
Publication Year
2025
Number of pages
15
Publisher
1Kerrville, TXAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Document type
Conference contribution
Abstract
A core aspect of compositionality, systematicity is a desirable property in ML models as it enables strong generalization to novel contexts. This has led to numerous studies proposing benchmarks to assess systematic generalization, as well as models and training regimes designed to enhance it. Many of these efforts are framed as addressing the challenge posed by Fodor and Pylyshyn. However, while they argue for systematicity of representations, existing benchmarks and models primarily focus on the systematicity of behaviour. We emphasize the crucial nature of this distinction. Furthermore, building on Hadley’s (1994) taxonomy of systematic generalization, we analyze the extent to which behavioural systematicity is tested by key benchmarks in the literature across language and vision. Finally, we highlight ways of assessing systematicity of representations in ML models as practiced in the field of mechanistic interpretability.
URL
go to publisher's site
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/087e3cc4-4d3f-45f1-86b1-ad512005e38f