Fully Distributed, Flexible Compositional Visual Representations via Soft Tensor Products

Since the inception of the classicalist vs. connectionist debate, it has been argued that the ability to systematically combine symbol-like entities into compositional representations is crucial for human intelligence. In connectionist systems, the field of disentanglement has gained prominence for its ability to produce explicitly compositional representations; however, it relies on a fundamentally representation of compositional structure that clashes with the foundations of deep learning. To resolve this tension, we extend Smolensky's Tensor Product Representation (TPR) and introduce, a representational form that encodes compositional structure in an inherently manner, along with, a theoretically-principled architecture designed specifically to learn Soft TPRs. Comprehensive evaluations in the visual representation learning domain demonstrate that the Soft TPR framework consistently outperforms conventional disentanglement alternatives -- achieving state-of-the-art disentanglement, boosting representation learner convergence, and delivering superior sample efficiency and low-sample regime performance in downstream tasks.