Beyond Statistical Learning: Exact Learning Is Essential for General Intelligence

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: György, András, Lattimore, Tor, Lazić, Nevena, Szepesvári, Csaba
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author György, András
Lattimore, Tor
Lazić, Nevena
Szepesvári, Csaba
author_facet György, András
Lattimore, Tor
Lazić, Nevena
Szepesvári, Csaba
contents Sound deductive reasoning -- the ability to derive new knowledge from existing facts and rules -- is an indisputably desirable aspect of general intelligence. Despite the major advances of AI systems in areas such as math and science, especially since the introduction of transformer architectures, it is well-documented that even the most advanced frontier systems regularly and consistently falter on easily-solvable deductive reasoning tasks. Hence, these systems are unfit to fulfill the dream of achieving artificial general intelligence capable of sound deductive reasoning. We argue that their unsound behavior is a consequence of the statistical learning approach powering their development. To overcome this, we contend that to achieve reliable deductive reasoning in learning-based AI systems, researchers must fundamentally shift from optimizing for statistical performance against distributions on reasoning problems and algorithmic tasks to embracing the more ambitious exact learning paradigm, which demands correctness on all inputs. We argue that exact learning is both essential and possible, and that this ambitious objective should guide algorithm design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_23908
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Statistical Learning: Exact Learning Is Essential for General Intelligence
György, András
Lattimore, Tor
Lazić, Nevena
Szepesvári, Csaba
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Sound deductive reasoning -- the ability to derive new knowledge from existing facts and rules -- is an indisputably desirable aspect of general intelligence. Despite the major advances of AI systems in areas such as math and science, especially since the introduction of transformer architectures, it is well-documented that even the most advanced frontier systems regularly and consistently falter on easily-solvable deductive reasoning tasks. Hence, these systems are unfit to fulfill the dream of achieving artificial general intelligence capable of sound deductive reasoning. We argue that their unsound behavior is a consequence of the statistical learning approach powering their development. To overcome this, we contend that to achieve reliable deductive reasoning in learning-based AI systems, researchers must fundamentally shift from optimizing for statistical performance against distributions on reasoning problems and algorithmic tasks to embracing the more ambitious exact learning paradigm, which demands correctness on all inputs. We argue that exact learning is both essential and possible, and that this ambitious objective should guide algorithm design.
title Beyond Statistical Learning: Exact Learning Is Essential for General Intelligence
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23908