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We consider concept generalization at a large scale in the diverse and natural visual spectrum. Established computational modes (i.e., rule-based or similarity-based) are primarily studied isolated and focus on confined and abstract problem spaces. In this work, we study these two modes when the problem space scales up, and the complexity of concepts becomes diverse. Specifically, at the representational level, we seek to answer how the complexity varies when a visual concept is mapped to the representation space. Prior psychology literature has shown that two types of complexities (i.e., subjective complexity and visual complexity) build an inverted-U relation. Leveraging the Representativeness of Attribute (RoA), we computationally confirm the following observation: Models use attributes with high RoA to describe visual concepts, and the description length falls in an inverted-U relation with the increment in visual complexity. At the computational level, we aim to answer how the complexity of representation affects the shift between the rule- and similarity-based generalization. We hypothesize that category-conditioned visual modeling estimates the co-occurrence frequency between visual and categorical attributes, thus potentially serving as the prior for the natural visual world. Experimental results show that representations with relatively high subjective complexity out-perform those with relatively low subjective complexity in the rule-based generalization, while the trend is the opposite in the similarity-based generalization. 

Inspired by humans’ exceptional ability to master arithmetic and generalize to new problems, we present a new dataset, Handwritten arithmetic with INTegers (HINT), to examine machines’ capability of learning generalizable concepts at three levels: perception, syntax, and semantics. In HINT, machines are tasked with learning how concepts are perceived from raw signals such as images (i.e., perception), how multiple concepts are structurally combined to form a valid expression (i.e., syntax), and how concepts are realized to afford various reasoning tasks (i.e., semantics), all in a weakly supervised manner. Focusing on systematic generalization, we carefully design a five-fold test set to evaluate both the interpolation and the extrapolation of learned concepts w.r.t. the three levels. Further, we design a few-shot learning split to determine whether or not models can rapidly learn new concepts and generalize them to more complex scenarios. To comprehend existing models’ limitations, we undertake extensive experiments with various sequence-to-sequence models, including RNNs, Transformers, and GPT-3 (with the chain of thought prompting). The results indicate that current models struggle to extrapolate to long-range syntactic dependency and semantics. Models exhibit a considerable gap toward human-level generalization when evaluated with new concepts in a few-shot setting. Moreover, we discover that it is infeasible to solve HINT by merely scaling up the dataset and the model size; this strategy contributes little to the extrapolation of syntax and semantics. Finally, in zero-shot GPT-3 experiments, the chain of thought prompting exhibits impressive results and significantly boosts the test accuracy. We believe the HINT dataset and the experimental findings are of great interest to the learning community on systematic generalization. 

Mathematical reasoning, a core ability of human intelligence, presents unique challenges for machines in abstract thinking and logical reasoning. Recent large pre-trained language models such as GPT-3 have achieved remarkable progress on mathematical reasoning tasks written in text form, such as math word problems (MWP). However, it is unknown if the models can handle more complex problems that involve math reasoning over heterogeneous information, such as tabular data. To fill the gap, we present Tabular Math Word Problems (TABMWP), a new dataset containing 38,431 open-domain grade-level problems that require mathematical reasoning on both textual and tabular data. Each question in TABMWP is aligned with a tabular context, which is presented as an image, semi-structured text, and a structured table. There are two types of questions: free-text and multi-choice, and each problem is annotated with gold solutions to reveal the multi-step reasoning process. We evaluate different pre-trained models on TABMWP, including the GPT-3 model in a few-shot setting. As earlier studies suggest, since few-shot GPT-3 relies on the selection of in-context examples, its performance is unstable and can degrade to near chance. The unstable issue is more severe when handling complex problems like TABMWP. To mitigate this, we further propose a novel approach, PROMPTPG, which utilizes policy gradient to learn to select in-context examples from a small amount of training data and then constructs the corresponding prompt for the test example. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the best baseline by 5.31% on the accuracy metric and reduces the prediction variance significantly compared to random selection, which verifies its effectiveness in selecting in-context examples. 

Is intelligence realized by connectionist or classicist? While connectionist approaches have achieved superhuman performance, there has been growing evidence that such task-specific superiority is particularly fragile in systematic generalization. This observation lies in the central debate between connectionist and classicist, wherein the latter continually advocates an algebraic treatment in cognitive architectures. In this work, we follow the classicist’s call and propose a hybrid approach to improve systematic generalization in reasoning. Specifically, we showcase a prototype with algebraic representation for the abstract spatial-temporal reasoning task of Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPM) and present the ALgebra-Aware Neuro-Semi-Symbolic (ALANS) learner. The ALANS learner is motivated by abstract algebra and the representation theory. It consists of a neural visual perception frontend and an algebraic abstract reasoning backend: the frontend summarizes the visual information from object-based representation, while the backend transforms it into an algebraic structure and induces the hidden operator on the fly. The induced operator is later executed to predict the answer’s representation, and the choice most similar to the prediction is selected as the solution. Extensive experiments show that by incorporating an algebraic treatment, the ALANS learner outperforms various pure connectionist models in domains requiring systematic generalization. We further show the generative nature of the learned algebraic representation; it can be decoded by isomorphism to generate an answer.