Abstraction reasoning is a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence. Recent studies suggest that many of the deep architectures that have triumphed over other domains failed to work well in abstract reasoning. In this paper, we first illustrate that one of the main challenges in such a reasoning task is the presence of distracting features, which requires the learning algorithm to leverage counter-evidence and to reject any of false hypothesis in order to learn the true patterns. We later show that carefully designed learning trajectory over different categories of training data can effectively boost learning performance by mitigating the impacts of distracting features. Inspired this fact, we propose feature robust abstract reasoning (FRAR) model, which consists of a reinforcement learning based teacher network to determine the sequence of training and a student network for predictions. Experimental results demonstrated strong improvements over baseline algorithms and we are able to beat the state-of-the-art models by 18.7\% in RAVEN dataset and 13.3\% in the PGM dataset.

As the performance on extrapolation is one of the key indicators of the model's abstract reasoning ability and extrapolation can also be treated as one kind of distracting features, a set of experiment on extrapolation will further demonstrate the proposed model's ability to distinguish distracting features and reasoning features. In addition, it would also be interesting to see how the performances of models other than LEN (e.g. RN, WReN, etc.) as the student networks can benefit from a teacher model. Clarity: The paper is generally well-written and structured clearly. Significance: This paper seems to be a useful contribution to the literature on abstract reasoning, showing a large improvement over the state of the art. Post-rebuttal update I am happy to main my ratings and recommend this work for acceptance after reading through other reviews as well as the author rebuttal, and engaging in the discussions. I look forward to seeing the discussions on disentangled representation, experimental results on extrapolation, and performances of models other than LEN in the camera ready version of this paper.

Abstraction reasoning is a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence. Recent studies suggest that many of the deep architectures that have triumphed over other domains failed to work well in abstract reasoning. In this paper, we first illustrate that one of the main challenges in such a reasoning task is the presence of distracting features, which requires the learning algorithm to leverage counter-evidence and to reject any of false hypothesis in order to learn the true patterns. We later show that carefully designed learning trajectory over different categories of training data can effectively boost learning performance by mitigating the impacts of distracting features. Inspired this fact, we propose feature robust abstract reasoning (FRAR) model, which consists of a reinforcement learning based teacher network to determine the sequence of training and a student network for predictions.

Abstraction reasoning is a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence. Recent studies suggest that many of the deep architectures that have triumphed over other domains failed to work well in abstract reasoning. In this paper, we first illustrate that one of the main challenges in such a reasoning task is the presence of distracting features, which requires the learning algorithm to leverage counter-evidence and to reject any of false hypothesis in order to learn the true patterns. We later show that carefully designed learning trajectory over different categories of training data can effectively boost learning performance by mitigating the impacts of distracting features. Inspired this fact, we propose feature robust abstract reasoning (FRAR) model, which consists of a reinforcement learning based teacher network to determine the sequence of training and a student network for predictions.