While quantitative evaluations of compositional and non-compositional approaches in SA exist in NLP, similar quantitative evaluations are very rare in FA in Linguistics that deal with linguistic expressions representing focus or emphasis such as "it was John who left". We fill this gap in research by arguing that compositional rules in SA also apply to FA because FA and SA are closely related meaning that SA is part of FA. Our compositional approach in SA exploits basic syntactic rules such as rules of modification, coordination, and negation represented in the formalism of Universal Dependencies (UDs) in English and applied to words representing sentiments from sentiment dictionaries. Some of the advantages of our compositional analysis method for SA in contrast to non-compositional analysis methods are interpretability and explainability. We test the accuracy of our compositional approach and compare it with a non-compositional approach VADER that uses simple heuristic rules to deal with negation, coordination and modification. In contrast to previous related work that evaluates compositionality in SA on long reviews, this study uses more appropriate datasets to evaluate compositionality. In addition, we generalize the results of compositional approaches in SA to compositional approaches in FA.

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) techniques enable robots to learn and generalize tasks from user demonstrations, eliminating the need for coding expertise among end-users. One established technique to implement LfD in robots is to encode demonstrations in a stable Dynamical System (DS). However, finding a stable dynamical system entails solving an optimization problem with bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) constraints, a non-convex problem which, depending on the number of scalar constraints and variables, demands significant computational resources and is susceptible to numerical issues such as floating-point errors. To address these challenges, we propose a novel compositional approach that enhances the applicability and scalability of learning stable DSs with BMIs.

In this paper, we examine the impact of lexicalization on Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD). It is well known that one of the key challenges in interpreting natural language questions with respect to SPARQL lies in bridging the lexical gap, that is mapping the words in the query to the correct vocabulary elements. We argue in this paper that lexicalization, that is explicit knowledge about the potential interpretations of a word with respect to the given vocabulary, significantly eases the task and increases the performance of QA systems. Towards this goal, we present a compositional QA system that can leverage explicit lexical knowledge in a compositional manner to infer the meaning of a question in terms of a SPARQL query. We show that such a system, given lexical knowledge, has a performance well beyond current QA systems, achieving up to a $35.8\%$ increase in the micro $F_1$ score compared to the best QA system on QALD-9. This shows the importance and potential of including explicit lexical knowledge. In contrast, we show that LLMs have limited abilities to exploit lexical knowledge, with only marginal improvements compared to a version without lexical knowledge. This shows that LLMs have no ability to compositionally interpret a question on the basis of the meaning of its parts, a key feature of compositional approaches. Taken together, our work shows new avenues for QALD research, emphasizing the importance of lexicalization and compositionality.

Humans can perform various combinations of physical skills without having to relearn skills from scratch every single time. For example, we can swing a bat when walking without having to re-learn such a policy from scratch by composing the individual skills of walking and bat swinging. Enabling robots to combine or compose skills is essential so they can learn novel skills and tasks faster with fewer real world samples. To this end, we propose a novel compositional approach called DSE- Diffusion Score Equilibrium that enables few-shot learning for novel skills by utilizing a combination of base policy priors. Our method is based on probabilistically composing diffusion policies to better model the few-shot demonstration data-distribution than any individual policy. Our goal here is to learn robot motions few-shot and not necessarily goal oriented trajectories. Unfortunately we lack a general purpose metric to evaluate the error between a skill or motion and the provided demonstrations. Hence, we propose a probabilistic measure - Maximum Mean Discrepancy on the Forward Kinematics Kernel (MMD-FK), that is task and action space agnostic. By using our few-shot learning approach DSE, we show that we are able to achieve a reduction of over 30% in MMD-FK across skills and number of demonstrations. Moreover, we show the utility of our approach through real world experiments by teaching novel trajectories to a robot in 5 demonstrations.

Many real-world systems can be represented as sets of interacting components. Examples of such systems include computational systems such as query processors, natural systems such as cells, and social systems such as families. Many approaches have been proposed in traditional (associational) machine learning to model such structured systems, including statistical relational models and graph neural networks. Despite this prior work, existing approaches to estimating causal effects typically treat such systems as single units, represent them with a fixed set of variables and assume a homogeneous data-generating process. We study a compositional approach for estimating individual treatment effects (ITE) in structured systems, where each unit is represented by the composition of multiple heterogeneous components. This approach uses a modular architecture to model potential outcomes at each component and aggregates component-level potential outcomes to obtain the unit-level potential outcomes. We discover novel benefits of the compositional approach in causal inference - systematic generalization to estimate counterfactual outcomes of unseen combinations of components and improved overlap guarantees between treatment and control groups compared to the classical methods for causal effect estimation. We also introduce a set of novel environments for empirically evaluating the compositional approach and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using both simulated and real-world data.

In the age of highly automated systems and the development of autonomous systems, a possible application scenario for ANNs is to use them as controllers for safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPSes) [9]. Such CPSes capture the often complex environment, analyse the data and make control decisions about the future system behaviour. Guarantees on compliance with safety requirements, e.g., that human lives are not endangered, are of utmost importance. Whenever such guarantees are obtained via formal verification of the system behaviour, an ANN being a component of the system under analysis has also to be subject to verification [23]. The underlying weighted summation of the input neurons before application of the activation function can be represented by simple linear combinations and is therefore very appealing for classical verification methods dealing with linear arithmetic. However, this observation is deceptive when nonlinear activation functions are part of the ANN as such nonlinear functions are often hard to analyse in themselves [23]. Apart from restricted decidability results for reachability problems as in [9], the runtime of algorithms for automatic verification suffers from the multiple occurrence of nonlinear activation functions in complex ANNs such that only relatively small networks could be tackled. Depending on the class of activation functions and the underlying possibly necessary abstractions thereof, recent approaches were able to deal with ANNs comprising 20 to 300 nodes [10, 18, 19]. So-called satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) solvers implement algorithms that search for solutions to Boolean combinations of arithmetic constraints or prove the absence thereof.

Download scientific diagram | The compositional approach. It consists of a feature engineering step to extract and select features from single/multiple neuroimaging modalities, and a machine learning step to perform a classification or regression task. from publication: Machine Learning Applications on Neuroimaging for Diagnosis and Prognosis of Epilepsy: A Review | Machine learning is playing an increasing important role in medical image analysis, spawning new advances in neuroimaging clinical applications. However, previous work and reviews were mainly focused on the electrophysiological signals like EEG or SEEG; the potential of... | Neuroimaging, Machine Learning and Epilepsy | ResearchGate, the professional network for scientists.

The ability to compose parts to form a more complex whole, and to analyze a whole as a combination of elements, is desirable across disciplines. This workshop bring together researchers applying compositional approaches to physics, NLP, cognitive science, and game theory. Within NLP, a long-standing aim is to represent how words can combine to form phrases and sentences. Within the framework of distributional semantics, words are represented as vectors in vector spaces. The categorical model of Coecke et al. [2010], inspired by quantum protocols, has provided a convincing account of compositionality in vector space models of NLP. There is furthermore a history of vector space models in cognitive science. Theories of categorization such as those developed by Nosofsky [1986] and Smith et al. [1988] utilise notions of distance between feature vectors. More recently G\"ardenfors [2004, 2014] has developed a model of concepts in which conceptual spaces provide geometric structures, and information is represented by points, vectors and regions in vector spaces. The same compositional approach has been applied to this formalism, giving conceptual spaces theory a richer model of compositionality than previously [Bolt et al., 2018]. Compositional approaches have also been applied in the study of strategic games and Nash equilibria. In contrast to classical game theory, where games are studied monolithically as one global object, compositional game theory works bottom-up by building large and complex games from smaller components. Such an approach is inherently difficult since the interaction between games has to be considered. Research into categorical compositional methods for this field have recently begun [Ghani et al., 2018]. Moreover, the interaction between the three disciplines of cognitive science, linguistics and game theory is a fertile ground for research. Game theory in cognitive science is a well-established area [Camerer, 2011]. Similarly game theoretic approaches have been applied in linguistics [J\"ager, 2008]. Lastly, the study of linguistics and cognitive science is intimately intertwined [Smolensky and Legendre, 2006, Jackendoff, 2007]. Physics supplies compositional approaches via vector spaces and categorical quantum theory, allowing the interplay between the three disciplines to be examined.

As autonomy becomes prevalent in many applications, ranging from recommendation systems to fully autonomous vehicles, there is an increased need to provide safety guarantees for such systems. The problem is difficult, as these are large, complex systems which operate in uncertain environments, requiring data-driven machine-learning components. However, learning techniques such as Deep Neural Networks, widely used today, are inherently unpredictable and lack the theoretical foundations to provide strong assurance guarantees. We present a compositional approach for the scalable, formal verification of autonomous systems that contain Deep Neural Network components. The approach uses assume-guarantee reasoning whereby {\em contracts}, encoding the input-output behavior of individual components, allow the designer to model and incorporate the behavior of the learning-enabled components working side-by-side with the other components. We illustrate the approach on an example taken from the autonomous vehicles domain.

Metagenomics characterizes the taxonomic diversity of microbial communities by sequencing DNA directly from an environmental sample. One of the main challenges in metagenomics data analysis is the binning step, where each sequenced read is assigned to a taxonomic clade. Due to the large volume of metagenomics datasets, binning methods need fast and accurate algorithms that can operate with reasonable computing requirements. While standard alignment-based methods provide state-of-the-art performance, compositional approaches that assign a taxonomic class to a DNA read based on the k-mers it contains have the potential to provide faster solutions. In this work, we investigate the potential of modern, large-scale machine learning implementations for taxonomic affectation of next-generation sequencing reads based on their k-mers profile. We show that machine learning-based compositional approaches benefit from increasing the number of fragments sampled from reference genome to tune their parameters, up to a coverage of about 10, and from increasing the k-mer size to about 12. Tuning these models involves training a machine learning model on about 10 8 samples in 10 7 dimensions, which is out of reach of standard soft-wares but can be done efficiently with modern implementations for large-scale machine learning. The resulting models are competitive in terms of accuracy with well-established alignment tools for problems involving a small to moderate number of candidate species, and for reasonable amounts of sequencing errors. We show, however, that compositional approaches are still limited in their ability to deal with problems involving a greater number of species, and more sensitive to sequencing errors. We finally confirm that compositional approach achieve faster prediction times, with a gain of 3 to 15 times with respect to the BWA-MEM short read mapper, depending on the number of candidate species and the level of sequencing noise.