What is compositionality in AI?

 title: 'Fig. 1: Comparison of the strengths of humans and statistical ML machines, illustrating the complementary ways they generalise in human-AI teaming scenarios. Humans excel at compositionality, common sense, abstraction from a few examples, and robustness. Statistical ML excels at large-scale data and inference efficiency, inference correctness, handling data complexity, and the universality of approximation. Overgeneralisation biases remain challenging for both humans and machines. Collaborative and explainable mechanisms are key to achieving alignment in human-AI teaming. See Table 3 for a complete overview of the properties of machine methods, including instance-based and analytical machines.'

Compositionality in AI refers to the ability to generate and produce novel combinations from known components, which is essential for systematic generalization. It is a fundamental principle in the design of traditional, logic-based systems. Many statistical methods have struggled with compositional generalization, while recent advancements aim to improve this ability in deep learning architectures by incorporating analytical components that reflect the compositional structure of a domain, such as structure-processing neural networks or metalearning for compositional generalization. Despite these efforts, achieving predictable and systematic generalization in AI remains a challenge, as most results are empirical and not reliably predictable[1].