Compositional Reasoning

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4 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 26

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On-Policy Distillation Teaches New Skills but Not New Knowledge
Oct 7, 2026Yixuan Tang, Yi YangOn-Policy Distillation Knowledge Distillation
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
ReHoPER: Receding-Horizon Planning for Enhanced Reasoning
Oct 1, 2026Saeed Ahmadnia, Cornelia CarageaCompositional Reasoning Sequential Decision Making
Department of Computer Science University of Illinois Chicago
A Spectral Theory of Compositional Learning
Sep 27, 2026Hugo RydelComputational Cognitive Modeling Compositional Reasoning
University of Manchester
Compositional Reasoning in Language Models under Reinforcement Learning Post-Training
Sep 16, 2026Yu He, Yingxi Li, Yifei Wang +1Compositional Reasoning RL Post-Training
Stanford University · Amazon AGI Labs
A Multi-Stage Rule-Chaining Framework for Compositional and Interpretable Cognitive Reasoning
Sep 12, 2026Deblina KarCompositional Reasoning Interpretable ML
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
From Atomic Evidence to Logical Composition: Structured Compositional Reasoning over Compound Answer Options
Aug 13, 2026Obed Junias, Maria Leonor PachecoCompositional Reasoning Multiple-Choice Question Answering
University of Colorado Boulder
Geo-Spatial Concept Probing of Large Language Models: Abstraction, Compositionality, and Grounding
Aug 7, 2026Karim Radouane, Jose G Moreno, Lynda TamineSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks LLM Grounding
University of Toulouse, IRIT Toulouse, France
The Ignition Is Real, and It Lives at the Readout: Latent composition, difficulty-clocked ignition, and the interface-constituted commit in a recurrent-depth reasoner
Aug 4, 2026Simon Lam-MuirCompositional Reasoning Representation Geometry in Language Models
Prime Calibre, Australia
RECON: Benchmarking Agent Memory for Compositional Reasoning over Long Contexts
Jul 18, 2026Mihir Shriniwas AryaCompositional Reasoning LLM Agent Memory
Department of Computer Science and Engineering RV College of Engineering
Concretized Proposition Prompting Resolves Composition-Knowledge Dichotomy in Large Language Models
Jul 9, 2026Changhun Lee, Minguk Jeon, Jongkyung Shin +1Compositional Reasoning LLM Prompting
Columbia University · UNIST · POSCO Holdings
RL Post-Training Builds Compositional Reasoning Strategies
Jul 8, 2026Azwar Abdulsalam, Nishil Patel, Andrew SaxeCompositional Reasoning RL for Language Model Reasoning
Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL, London, United Kingdom.
ReasonCLIP-58M: Visually Grounded Commonsense Reasoning Supervision for CLIP
Jun 25, 2026Sicheng Zhang, Muzammal Naseer, Binzhu Xie +5Compositional Reasoning Multimodal Reasoning
Khalifa University · University of Western Australia · The Chinese University of Hong Kong +2
Holographic Memory for Zero-Shot Compositional Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs: A Mechanistic Study of Where and Why It Fails
Jun 23, 2026Randhir KumarCompositional Reasoning KG Embedding
Independent Researcher
Mat-Pref: Verifiable-Reward Training Improves Compositional Reasoning in Inorganic Materials
Jun 20, 2026Sarrah R. Mikhail Leung, Taehan Kim, Jeongbin ParkCompositional Reasoning RL for Language Model Reasoning
University of California, Berkeley · 2Machine Learning at Berkeley · University of Michigan
Compositional Reasoning Depth Predicts Clinical AI Failure: Empirical Evidence Consistent with Transformer Compositionality Limits in Electronic Health Record Question Answering
Jun 15, 2026Sanjay BasuMulti-Hop QA Compositional Reasoning
Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA · Waymark, San Francisco, CA
Operadic consistency: a label-free signal for compositional reasoning failures in LLMs
Jun 11, 2026Nathaniel Bottman, Yinhong Liu, Kyle RichardsonCompositional Reasoning Reasoning Consistency in Language Models
Incubilate · University of Cambridge · Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Operads for compositional reasoning in LLMs
Jun 11, 2026Nathaniel Bottman, Kyle RichardsonMulti-Hop QA Compositional Reasoning
Incubilate, Seattle, USA · Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, USA
Principles of Concept Representation in Sentence Encoders
Jun 5, 2026Isabelle Mohr, John Dujany, Jonathan Souquet +1Sentence Embeddings Compositional Reasoning
Idiap Research Institute · Merck KGaA
R-APS: Compositional Reasoning and In-Context Meta-Learning for Constrained Design via Reflective Adversarial Pareto Search
Jun 3, 2026João Pedro Gandarela, Thiago Rios, Stefan Menzel +1Mechanism Design Meta-Learning
Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland · École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland · Honda Research Institute Europe, Germany +2
Composition Collapse: Stable Factual Knowledge Does Not Imply Compositional Reasoning
May 26, 2026Zhe Yu, Wenpeng Xing, Yunzhao Wei +4Compositional Reasoning Reasoning Evaluation
Binjiang Institute of Zhejiang University · Zhejiang University · Hong Kong Baptist University +2
Convex Compositional Reasoning Models
May 22, 2026Meir Roketlishvili, Semyon Semenov, Maksim Bobrin +7Compositional Reasoning Energy-Based Models
Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE · Applied AI Institute, Computational Imaging Lab · AXXX
Shortcut Solutions Learned by Transformers Impair Continual Compositional Reasoning
May 6, 2026William T. Redman, Erik C. Johnson, Brian RobinsonCompositional Reasoning Continual Learning
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
The Power of Power Law: Asymmetry Enables Compositional Reasoning
Apr 24, 2026Zixuan Wang, Xingyu Dang, Jason D. Lee +1Long-Tail Learning Compositional Reasoning
1Princeton University · University of California, Berke · 3Tsinghua University
KnowledgeBerg: Evaluating Systematic Knowledge Coverage and Compositional Reasoning in Large Language Models
Apr 19, 2026Xiao Zhang, Qianru Meng, Yongjian Chen +2LLM Evaluation Compositional Reasoning
University of Groningen · LIACS, Leiden University
Poly-attention: a general scheme for higher-order self-attention
Feb 2, 2026Sayak Chakrabarti, Toniann Pitassi, Josh AlmanSelf-Attention Compositional Reasoning
Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027.
Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning
Aug 24, 2025Fucai Ke, Joy Hsu, Zhixi Cai +10Compositional Reasoning Visual Reasoning
Monash University · Stanford University · University of Washington +3

Oct 7, 2026, cs.CLJ/K move · Enter open · S save

On-Policy Distillation Teaches New Skills but Not New Knowledge

Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

On-Policy Distillation Knowledge Distillation Compositional Reasoning

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On-policy distillation (OPD) strengthens language-model reasoning, yet whether students acquire new factual knowledge or compositional skill for multi-step reasoning remains unknown. We separate these capabilities using a controlled synthetic framework that measures the student's initial capabilities and independently controls the teacher's additional facts, compositional skill, or both. Across four models from three families, reverse-KL OPD reliably transfers compositional skill across unseen reasoning structures, but transfers minimal factual knowledge. Decoupling the distillation recipe reveals the source of this asymmetry: replacing reverse KL with forward KL restores factual transfer, whereas student rollouts specifically improve the execution of multi-step reasoning. Experiments on recent factual QA and competition mathematics show a similar asymmetry under reverse-KL OPD, yielding notable reasoning gains without factual memory expansion. Together, these results demonstrate that on-policy distillation does not expand a model's parametric knowledge, but instead teaches it to organize and compose the knowledge it already possesses.

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