Knowledge transfer between simple discrete worlds

Abstract:Adapting to a new world and reasoning correctly about which outcomes are possible under rules one has not met before is a basic capacity underlying general intelligence. We study it in small discrete worlds: sets of grid configurations consistent with a shared set of rules, concretely Sudoku-like puzzles built from a common base and a handful of extra rules. We train a single depth-recurrent model on many combinations of rules and test it at four levels of novelty: a new puzzle, a new combination of known rules, a pairing of rules never seen together, and a rule instance not seen at all during training. The model receives the active rules either as a symbolic description or as two solved examples, and a model that gets no rule information is used as a baseline. At recombining rules it was trained on, the description matches or exceeds examples ($99\%$ against $95\%$ on new combinations). On rule instances whose components never co-occurred in training, the description falls below the no-information baseline while examples stay above it. The framework allows us to test many such generalization regimes in more systematic way than benchmarks such as ARC-AGI and provides new ground for evaluating depth-recurrent reasoning models, which are typically tested on saturated Sudoku benchmarks.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2610.15081 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.15081v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.15081 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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