Vector Symbolic Algebras for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus

📅 2025-11-11
📈 Citations: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
Current AI systems struggle with human-like abstract reasoning on ARC-AGI—a benchmark designed to assess fluid intelligence. Method: We propose the first neural-symbolic approach for ARC-AGI grounded in Vector Symbolic Algebra (VSA), unifying System 1 intuition and System 2 reasoning to enable interpretable, object-centric, few-shot program synthesis. Our method leverages VSA for abstraction representation and structured reasoning, yielding a solver more aligned with cognitive principles. Contribution/Results: On ARC-AGI-1-Train and Eval sets, our method achieves 10.8% and 3.0% accuracy, respectively. It attains 94.5% accuracy on Sort-of-ARC and 83.1% on 1D-ARC—surpassing GPT-4 with drastically lower computational overhead. This work establishes a novel paradigm for efficient, interpretable abstract reasoning in artificial general intelligence.

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📝 Abstract
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) is a generative, few-shot fluid intelligence benchmark. Although humans effortlessly solve ARC-AGI, it remains extremely difficult for even the most advanced artificial intelligence systems. Inspired by methods for modelling human intelligence spanning neuroscience to psychology, we propose a cognitively plausible ARC-AGI solver. Our solver integrates System 1 intuitions with System 2 reasoning in an efficient and interpretable process using neurosymbolic methods based on Vector Symbolic Algebras (VSAs). Our solver works by object-centric program synthesis, leveraging VSAs to represent abstract objects, guide solution search, and enable sample-efficient neural learning. Preliminary results indicate success, with our solver scoring 10.8% on ARC-AGI-1-Train and 3.0% on ARC-AGI-1-Eval. Additionally, our solver performs well on simpler benchmarks, scoring 94.5% on Sort-of-ARC and 83.1% on 1D-ARC -- the latter outperforming GPT-4 at a tiny fraction of the computational cost. Importantly, our approach is unique; we believe we are the first to apply VSAs to ARC-AGI and have developed the most cognitively plausible ARC-AGI solver yet. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ijoffe/ARC-VSA-2025.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Solving the challenging ARC-AGI benchmark for artificial general intelligence
Developing cognitively plausible reasoning using Vector Symbolic Algebras
Integrating System 1 intuitions with System 2 reasoning efficiently
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Uses Vector Symbolic Algebras for neurosymbolic reasoning
Integrates System 1 intuition with System 2 reasoning
Performs object-centric program synthesis for ARC-AGI
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I
Isaac Joffe
Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON
Chris Eliasmith
Chris Eliasmith
Professor, University of Waterloo
theoretical neurosciencebrain modellingmachine learningartificial intelligencephilosophy of mind