Portrait of Melisa Civelekoğlu

Melisa Civelekoğlu

melisa.civelekoglu@mila.quebec
Master's Research - Université Laval
Supervisor
Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz
Research Topics
Deep Learning

Publications

TPR-Attention for Combinatorial Generalization
Melisa Civelekoğlu
Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz
Systematic generalization remains a significant challenge in deep learning. In particular, combinatorial generalization - generalizing to ne… (see more)w configurations of known factors of variation - is effortless for humans but difficult for standard neural architectures that rely on statistical correlations rather than explicit structural representations. We introduce a new architectural component that embeds structured inductive bias into deep learning: an attention mechanism operating over tensor-product representations (TPRs). Through controlled experiments on compositional tasks, we show that this TPR-attention mechanism outperforms existing architectural components in combinatorial generalization. These results highlight the value of integrating explicit compositional structure into neural attention and point toward a promising path for models capable of systematic generalization.
2026-08-30
arXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org