Investigating More Explainable and Partition-Free Compositionality Estimation for LLMs: A Rule-Generation Perspective
Ziyao Xu, Cong Wang, Houfeng Wang
Abstract
Compositional generalization tests are often used to estimate the compositionality of LLMs. However, such tests have the following limitations: (1) they only focus on the output results without considering LLMs' understanding of sample compositionality, resulting in explainability defects; (2) they rely on dataset partition to form the test set with combinations unseen in the training set, suffering from combination leakage issues. In this work, we propose a novel rule-generation perspective for compositionality estimation for LLMs. It requires LLMs to generate a program as rules for dataset mapping and provides estimates of the compositionality of LLMs using complexity-based theory. The perspective addresses the limitations of compositional generalization tests and provides a new way to analyze the compositionality characterization of LLMs. We conduct experiments and analysis of existing advanced LLMs based on this perspective on a string-to-grid task, and find various compositionality characterizations and compositionality deficiencies exhibited by LLMs.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.