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arXiv · 2608.20054

What You Can't See Is What You Learn: Slot-Selective Evidence Masking Favors Compositional Generalization in Shared-Genome Language-Model Societies

Narcis Marincat
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Abstract

Multi-module neural systems often expose every module to the full input. We test whether a slot-selective evidence-masking regime -- restricting each module to its own evidence span -- changes which solutions gradient-based training discovers. Four-cell societies share one frozen pretrained language model and one low-rank adapter, communicating only through two model-width continuous vectors in a fixed relay. On a prospectively sealed natural-language function-composition task, we train ten matched restricted/global pairs identical except for the attention mask. Restricted-visibility societies outperform their globally visible twins by at least 20 percentage points at both depths in 9 of 10 pairs, with median paired advantages of 0.7648 and 0.6050. Cutting communication reduces every restricted society to chance, and in a post hoc collision-stratified analysis the depth-three advantage remains 0.558 on programs whose complete affine map never appeared in training. In six post hoc-selected restricted societies, packet interventions on correctly answered held-out episodes are consistent with approximately value-indexed relay states; the sole high-performing global model also requires communication, but its same-value packets are not interchangeable across episodes. Thus restricted visibility is not necessary for composition. Under the tested seeds, streams, task world, and training budget, the masking regime strongly shifted which solutions training discovered: a post hoc mask crossover finds both arms mask-native. Because the restricted mask both blocks foreign evidence and implicitly identifies each cell's assigned slot, attribution to evidence visibility alone awaits a role-marked control. The preregistered battery nevertheless formally fails because restricted-arm median depth-three accuracy is 0.6988, below the 0.70 floor; an earlier qualification cohort yielded 0/10 complete passes.

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Narcis Marincat. 2026-08-25. What You Can't See Is What You Learn: Slot-Selective Evidence Masking Favors Compositional Generalization in Shared-Genome Language-Model Societies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20054

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