English

Abstraction and Analogy-Making in Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence 2022-01-19 v2

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.10717,
  title  = {Abstraction and Analogy-Making in Artificial Intelligence},
  author = {Melanie Mitchell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.10717},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Revised version. 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:22:51.494Z