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Declan Iain Campbell

4 accepted papers

2026

Bound by semanticity: universal laws governing the generalization-identification tradeoff

ICLR 2026poster

Intelligent systems must form internal representations that support both broad generalization and precise identification. Here, we show that these two goals are fundamentally in tension with one another. We derive closed-form expressions proving that any model whose representations have a finite s…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Visual symbolic mechanisms: Emergent symbol processing in Vision Language Models

ICLR 2026oral

To accurately process a visual scene, observers must bind features together to represent individual objects. This capacity is necessary, for instance, to distinguish an image containing a red square and a blue circle from an image containing a blue square and a red circle. Recent work has found that…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Emergent Symbolic Mechanisms Support Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Many recent studies have found evidence for emergent reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), but debate persists concerning the robustness of these capabilities, and the extent to which they depend on structured reasoning mechanisms. To shed light on these issues, we study the intern…

2024

Understanding the Limits of Vision Language Models Through the Lens of the Binding Problem

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recent work has documented striking heterogeneity in the performance of state-of-the-art vision language models (VLMs), including both multimodal language models and text-to-image models. These models are able to describe and generate a diverse array of complex, naturalistic images, yet they exhibit…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar