A system for teaching compositionality to convolutional neural networks includes an unmasked convolutional neural network comprising a first set of convolutional neural network layers; a first masked convolutional neural network comprising a second set of convolutional neural network layers; the unmasked convolutional neural network and the first masked convolutional network sharing convolutional neural network weights; the system training the unmasked and first masked convolutional neural networks simultaneously based on an objective function that seeks to reduce both discriminative loss and compositional loss.