Understanding Multi-compositional learning in Vision and Language models via Category Theory

Sotirios Panagiotis Chytas*, Hyunwoo J Kim, Vikas Singh ;

"Pre-trained large language models (and multi-modal models) offer excellent performance across a wide range of tasks. Despite their effectiveness, we have limited knowledge of their internal knowledge representation. To get started, we use the classic problem of Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) as an example, and first provide a structured view of the latent space that any general model (LLM or otherwise) should nominally respect. We obtain a practical solution to the CZSL problem that can deal with both Open and Closed-World single-attribute compositions as well as multi-attribute compositions with relative ease, where we achieve performance competitive with methods designed solely for that task (i.e., adaptations to other tasks are difficult). Then, we extend this perspective to analysis of existing LLMs and ask to what extent they satisfy our axiomatic definitions. Our analysis shows a mix of interesting and unsurprising findings, but nonetheless suggests that our criteria is meaningful and may yield a more structured approach for potential incorporation in training such models, strategies for additional data collection, and diagnostics beyond visual inspection. The code is available at https://github.com/SPChytas/CatCom."