Abstract Visual Reasoning by Self-supervised Contrastive Learning

Neuro-symbolic models of artificial intelligence (AI) have been recently developed to perform tasks involving abstract visual reasoning that is a hallmark of human intelligence but remains challenging for deep neural network methods. However, most of the current neuro-symbolic models also rely on supervised learning and auxiliary annotations, different from human cognitive processes that are much dependent on the general cognitive abilities of entity and rule recognitions, rather than learning how to solve the specific tasks from examples. In this work, we propose a neuro-symbolic model by self-supervised contrastive learning (NS-SSCL) with unique and invariant representations of entities and rules in the perception and reasoning modules, respectively, to solve Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPMs) and its variant, a typical type of visual reasoning task used to test human intelligence. The perception module parses each object into invariant representations of attributes. The reasoning module grounds the representations of object attributes to form the latent rule representations also through SSCL. Further, the relationships between the neural representations of object attributes and symbols used for rule reasoning are coherently mapped. Finally, the scene generation engine aggregates all attribute and rule representation distributions to produce a probabilistic representation of the target. NS-SSCL obtains state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised models to solve the RAVEN and V-PROM benchmarks, even better than most of the supervised models. The success of the proposed model suggests that construction of general cognitive abilities like humans may render the AI algorithms to solve complex tasks involving higher-level cognition such as abstract reasoning in a human-like manner.