Enabling Systematic Generalization in Abstract Spatial Reasoning through Meta-Learning for Compositionality

Systematic generalization refers to the capacity to understand and generate novel combinations from known components. Despite recent progress by large language models (LLMs) across various domains, these models often fail to extend their knowledge to novel compositional scenarios, revealing notable limitations in systematic generalization. There has been an ongoing debate about whether neural networks possess the capacity for systematic generalization, with recent studies suggesting that meta-learning approaches designed for compositionality can significantly enhance this ability. However, these insights have largely been confined to linguistic problems, leaving their applicability to other tasks an open question. In this study, we extend the approach of meta-learning for compositionality to the domain of abstract spatial reasoning. To this end, we introduce $\textit{SYGAR}$-a dataset designed to evaluate the capacity of models to systematically generalize from known geometric transformations (e.g., translation, rotation) of two-dimensional objects to novel combinations of these transformations (e.g., translation+rotation). Our results show that a transformer-based encoder-decoder model, trained via meta-learning for compositionality, can systematically generalize to previously unseen transformation compositions, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art LLMs, including o3-mini, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.0 Flash, which fail to exhibit similar systematic behavior. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of meta-learning in promoting systematicity beyond linguistic tasks, suggesting a promising direction toward more robust and generalizable models.

Beyond Text: Optimizing RAG with Multimodal Inputs for Industrial Applications

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in answering questions, but they lack domain-specific knowledge and are prone to hallucinations. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is one approach to address these challenges, while multimodal models are emerging as promising AI assistants for processing both text and images. In this paper we describe a series of experiments aimed at determining how to best integrate multimodal models into RAG systems for the industrial domain. The purpose of the experiments is to determine whether including images alongside text from documents within the industrial domain increases RAG performance and to find the optimal configuration for such a multimodal RAG system. Our experiments include two approaches for image processing and retrieval, as well as two LLMs (GPT4-Vision and LLaVA) for answer synthesis. These image processing strategies involve the use of multimodal embeddings and the generation of textual summaries from images. We evaluate our experiments with an LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Our results reveal that multimodal RAG can outperform single-modality RAG settings, although image retrieval poses a greater challenge than text retrieval. Additionally, leveraging textual summaries from images presents a more promising approach compared to the use of multimodal embeddings, providing more opportunities for future advancements.