We demonstrate that structured distortion of training data - which we term complexity induction - can induce compositional generalization in a standard CNN classifier without architectural modification. Using synthetic images of colored geometric shapes, we encode classes as flat string labels (e.g., "red-circle") with no explicit attribute decomposition, and exclude certain color-shape combinations from training entirely. We apply two distortion methods derived from Jaccard string similarity between class names: mixed labels (soft target distributions encoding inter-class overlap) and expanded dataset (false training samples with structurally motivated incorrect labels). Both methods induce the ability to predict unseen class combinations, and act at different levels: mixed labels activate the classifier for unseen combinations by exploiting the CNN's natural embedding structure, while expanded training improves the embedding factorization itself. A control with random (unstructured) false labels confirms that the effect depends on the structure of the distortion, not on noise per se. These results suggest that structured complication of training signals can influence both the internal organization of learned representations and their compositional interpretation - a principle that may underlie the role of natural language in cognitive development.
Object-centric learning aims to represent scenes as objects whose properties can be reused in new combinations. Existing evaluations usually score segmentation, single-image factor prediction, or downstream accuracy, but these tests do not directly ask whether a per-object representation behaves correctly under a controlled semantic edit. We introduce EditCLEVR, a paired-scene intervention benchmark in which each example contains a before/after pair of CLEVR-style renders with the same object indices and scene layout, and either exactly one known attribute change on one known object or a no-edit re-render for drift measurement. The protocol includes probe-free diagnostics for representation-change localization and stability, together with probe-decoded semantic faithfulness metrics that test whether the predicted scene change matches the intended intervention across in-distribution and compositional out-of-distribution (OOD) suites, allowing code-space movement and decoded object-attribute correctness to be evaluated separately. We introduce the semantic metric Scene-Graph Intervention Accuracy (SGIA), which requires the full after-scene prediction to be correct and the only predicted before-to-after semantic change to be the intended object-factor edit. We also establish Delta-SGIA as a companion diagnostic that checks the single-site change pattern without requiring the full after-scene graph to be correct. Baseline evaluations on ground-truth-mask backbones, learned-slot models, SAM 2 + frozen-ViT models, and one mask-feature hybrid indicate that CoGenT-OOD-core degradation can persist under ground-truth instance masks, that mask source accounts for part but not all of native performance, and that locality or stability alone can overstate semantic faithfulness. Code is available at https://github.com/torux-bughunter/EditCLEVR.