Reachability Is Not Generalization: Understanding Verb--Noun Decomposition in Assembly Action Recognition

Assembly actions are compositional: they combine a manipulation with a part or tool. In deployment, systems routinely encounter novel combinations of familiar components, yet an atomic action classifier assigns every unseen combination exactly zero probability by construction. The prevailing solution is verb--noun decomposition, which predicts components separately and recombines them to reach unseen actions. While widely adopted, how decomposition generalizes under compositional shift remains poorly understood. We present a systematic analysis of verb--noun decomposition across three assembly datasets (MECCANO, HAViD, and IMPACT). Although decomposition escapes the atomic ceiling, its generalization extends only partially beyond it. Unseen-composition performance remains strongly tied to the co-occurrence structure of the training data, indicating that much of the observed gain arises from interpolation within densely supported regions of the compositional space rather than from unconstrained recombination. Across datasets, failures consistently concentrate on the larger-vocabulary component, and IMPACT's verb-heavy vocabulary reverses the bottleneck from nouns to verbs. We further show that shared-encoder training introduces component entanglement, encouraging reliance on co-occurrence patterns that transfer poorly to unseen compositions and trailing independent recombination by up to 6.0× in harmonic mean. Taken together, these findings explain why decomposition achieves only partial compositional generalization in practice. By identifying primitive support, vocabulary asymmetry, and component entanglement as connected sources of error, we provide a portable diagnostic framework for studying compositional recognition beyond aggregate accuracy. Code: https://github.com/hisalaheiyo/assembly.