On Provable Length and Compositional Generalization

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Abstract:Out-of-distribution generalization capabilities of sequence-to-sequence models can be studied from the lens of two crucial forms of generalization: length generalization — the ability to generalize to longer sequences than ones seen during training, and compositional generalization: the ability to generalize to token combinations not seen during training. In this work, we provide first provable guarantees on length and compositional generalization for common sequence-to-sequence models — deep sets, transformers, state space models, and recurrent neural nets — trained to minimize the prediction error. Taking a first principles perspective, we study the realizable case, i.e., the labeling function is realizable on the architecture. We show that emph{simple limited capacity} versions of these different architectures achieve both length and compositional generalization. In all our results across different architectures, we find that the learned representations are linearly related to the representations generated by the true labeling function.