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Observations abound about the power of visual imagery in human intelligence, from how Nobel prize-winning physicists make their discoveries to how children understand bedtime stories. These observations raise an important question for cognitive science, which is, what are the computations taking place in someone’s mind when they use visual imagery? Answering this question is not easy and will require much continued research across the multiple disciplines of cognitive science. Here, we focus on a related and more circumscribed question from the perspective of artificial intelligence (AI): If you have an intelligent agent that uses visual imagery-based knowledge representations and reasoning operations, then what kinds of problem solving might be possible, and how would such problem solving work? We highlight recent progress in AI toward answering these questions in the domain of visuospatial reasoning, looking at a case study of how imagery-based artificial agents can solve visuospatial intelligence tests. In particular, we first examine several variations of imagery-based knowledge representations and problem-solving strategies that are sufficient for solving problems from the Raven’s Progressive Matrices intelligence test. We then look at how artificial agents, instead of being designed manually by AI researchers, might learn portions of their own knowledge and reasoning procedures from experience, including learning visuospatial domain knowledge, learning and generalizing problem-solving strategies, and learning the actual definition of the task in the first place.
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A measure of visuospatial reasoning skills: Painting the big picture
Visuospatial reasoning refers to a diverse set of skills that involve thinking about space and time. An artificial agent with access to a sufficiently large set of visuospatial reasoning skills might be able to generalize its reasoning ability to an unprecedented expanse of tasks including portions of many popular intelligence tests. In this paper, we stress the importance of a developmental approach to the study of visuospatial reasoning, with an emphasis on fundamental skills. A comprehensive benchmark, with properties we outline in this paper including breadth, depth, explainability, and domain-specificity, would encourage and measure the genesis of such a skillset. Lacking an existing benchmark that satisfies these properties, we outline the design of a novel test in this paper. Such a benchmark would allow for expanding analysis of existing datasets’ and agents’ applicability to the problem of generalized visuospatial reasoning.
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- PAR ID:
- 10209972
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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