In plain words: A survey compares three routes to abstraction and analogy in AI: hand-built symbol rules, deep neural networks, and systems that guess short programs from examples. None comes close to human-like abstraction, so it proposes concrete challenge tasks and scoring rules to measure real progress.
Abstract
Conceptual abstraction and analogy-making are key abilities underlying humans' abilities to learn, reason, and robustly adapt their knowledge to new domains. Despite of a long history of research on constructing AI systems with these abilities, no current AI system is anywhere close to a capability of forming humanlike abstractions or analogies. This paper reviews the advantages and limitations of several approaches toward this goal, including symbolic methods, deep learning, and probabilistic program induction. The paper concludes with several proposals for designing challenge tasks and evaluation measures in order to make quantifiable and generalizable progress in this area.
Melanie Mitchell
arXiv:2102.10717 · cs.AI · submitted Feb 22, 2021 · updated May 14, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · Revised version. 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences