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Abstract
Compositional generation underlies the systematic and essentially unlimited construction of complex concepts from simpler parts, as is foundational to intelligent behavior, but its underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. Here we reveal a neural implementation of hierarchical compositional construction of abstract sequences. We demonstrate that in an open-ended setting with very sparse feedback, rats innately utilize hierarchical composition to construct adaptive action sequences that would have been difficult to discover from scratch. Prefrontal neural population representations of these abstract sequences adhere to a low-dimensional format that encodes the orderly progression of elemental units comprising the sequence while converging to a sequence-general endpoint. Higher-level compositions in the hierarchy are systematically related to their lower-level constituent parts, reusing much of the representation, while providing context separation and satisfying format constraints. These neural representations are geometrically identical across animals, pointing to a convergent solution for how knowledge is hierarchically assembled via a compositional mechanism.
