synergy

Definition

The claim that combining components yields more than the sum of their separate contributions — the usual justification for fusing modalities, stacking techniques, or pairing retrieval with generation. It is a claim that needs evidence rather than assertion: demonstrating synergy requires ablations that measure each part alone under the same budget, since a gain that comes from simply adding capacity is not synergy.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Deep-Dive: The 'Physics' of Multimodal Pretraining — Which Way Does Knowledge Actually Flow?Towards Physics of Multimodal Pretraining: Knowledge Flow, Modality Synergy, Early Unification, and Recipes