Tackling the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus with Vision Transformers: the Importance of 2D Representation, Positions, and Objects

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Hauptverfasser: Li, Wenhao, Xu, Yudong, Sanner, Scott, Khalil, Elias Boutros
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Li, Wenhao
Xu, Yudong
Sanner, Scott
Khalil, Elias Boutros
author_facet Li, Wenhao
Xu, Yudong
Sanner, Scott
Khalil, Elias Boutros
contents The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a popular benchmark focused on visual reasoning in the evaluation of Artificial Intelligence systems. In its original framing, an ARC task requires solving a program synthesis problem over small 2D images using a few input-output training pairs. In this work, we adopt the recently popular data-driven approach to the ARC and ask whether a Vision Transformer (ViT) can learn the implicit mapping, from input image to output image, that underlies the task. We show that a ViT -- otherwise a state-of-the-art model for images -- fails dramatically on most ARC tasks even when trained on one million examples per task. This points to an inherent representational deficiency of the ViT architecture that makes it incapable of uncovering the simple structured mappings underlying the ARC tasks. Building on these insights, we propose ViTARC, a ViT-style architecture that unlocks some of the visual reasoning capabilities required by the ARC. Specifically, we use a pixel-level input representation, design a spatially-aware tokenization scheme, and introduce a novel object-based positional encoding that leverages automatic segmentation, among other enhancements. Our task-specific ViTARC models achieve a test solve rate close to 100% on more than half of the 400 public ARC tasks strictly through supervised learning from input-output grids. This calls attention to the importance of imbuing the powerful (Vision) Transformer with the correct inductive biases for abstract visual reasoning that are critical even when the training data is plentiful and the mapping is noise-free. Hence, ViTARC provides a strong foundation for future research in visual reasoning using transformer-based architectures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_06405
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tackling the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus with Vision Transformers: the Importance of 2D Representation, Positions, and Objects
Li, Wenhao
Xu, Yudong
Sanner, Scott
Khalil, Elias Boutros
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a popular benchmark focused on visual reasoning in the evaluation of Artificial Intelligence systems. In its original framing, an ARC task requires solving a program synthesis problem over small 2D images using a few input-output training pairs. In this work, we adopt the recently popular data-driven approach to the ARC and ask whether a Vision Transformer (ViT) can learn the implicit mapping, from input image to output image, that underlies the task. We show that a ViT -- otherwise a state-of-the-art model for images -- fails dramatically on most ARC tasks even when trained on one million examples per task. This points to an inherent representational deficiency of the ViT architecture that makes it incapable of uncovering the simple structured mappings underlying the ARC tasks. Building on these insights, we propose ViTARC, a ViT-style architecture that unlocks some of the visual reasoning capabilities required by the ARC. Specifically, we use a pixel-level input representation, design a spatially-aware tokenization scheme, and introduce a novel object-based positional encoding that leverages automatic segmentation, among other enhancements. Our task-specific ViTARC models achieve a test solve rate close to 100% on more than half of the 400 public ARC tasks strictly through supervised learning from input-output grids. This calls attention to the importance of imbuing the powerful (Vision) Transformer with the correct inductive biases for abstract visual reasoning that are critical even when the training data is plentiful and the mapping is noise-free. Hence, ViTARC provides a strong foundation for future research in visual reasoning using transformer-based architectures.
title Tackling the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus with Vision Transformers: the Importance of 2D Representation, Positions, and Objects
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.06405