Necessary Conditions for Compositional Generalization in Visual Models

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission15042 Authors

Keywords: compositionality

Abstract: Compositional generalization, the ability to recognize familiar parts in novel contexts, is a defining property of intelligent systems. Modern models are trained on massive datasets, yet these are vanishingly small compared to the full combinatorial space of possible data, raising the question of whether models can reliably generalize to unseen combinations. To formalize what this requires, we propose a set of practically motivated desiderata that any compositionally generalizing system must satisfy, and analyze their implications under standard training with linear classification heads. We show that these desiderata necessitate \emph{linear factorization}, where representations decompose additively into per-concept components, and further imply near-orthogonality across factors. We establish dimension bounds that link the number of concepts to the geometry of representations. Empirically, we survey CLIP and SigLIP families, finding strong evidence for linear factorization, approximate orthogonality, and a tight correlation between the quality of factorization and compositional generalization. Together, our results identify the structural conditions that embeddings must satisfy for compositional generalization, and provide both theoretical clarity and empirical diagnostics for developing foundation models that generalize compositionally.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 15042