Learning to Substitute Components for Compositional Generalization

Abstract: Despite the rising prevalence of neural LLMs, recent empirical evidence suggests their deficiency in compositional generalization. One of the current de-facto solutions to this problem is compositional data augmentation, which aims to introduce additional compositional inductive bias. However, existing handcrafted augmentation strategies offer limited improvement when systematic generalization of neural LLMs requires multi-grained compositional bias (i.e., not limited to either lexical or structural biases alone) or when training sentences have an imbalanced difficulty distribution. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel compositional augmentation strategy called Component Substitution (CompSub), which enables multi-grained composition of substantial substructures across the entire training set. Furthermore, we introduce the Learning Component Substitution (LCS) framework. This framework empowers the learning of component substitution probabilities in CompSub in an end-to-end manner by maximizing the loss of neural LLMs, thereby prioritizing challenging compositions with elusive concepts and novel contexts. We extend the key ideas of CompSub and LCS to the recently emerging in-context learning scenarios of pre-trained LLMs, proposing the LCS-ICL algorithm to enhance the few-shot compositional generalization of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. Theoretically, we provide insights into why applying our algorithms to LLMs can improve compositional generalization performance. Empirically, our results on four standard compositional generalization benchmarks(SCAN, COGS, GeoQuery, and COGS-QL) demonstrate the superiority of CompSub, LCS, and LCS-ICL, with improvements of up to 66.5%, 10.3%, 1.4%, and 8.8%, respectively.