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.

Thisabstract extends on the previous work [21, 22] on program induction[16] using probabilistic programming. It describes possible further steps to extend that work, such that, ultimately, automatic probabilistic program synthesis can generalise over any reasonable set of inputs and outputs, in particular in regard to text, image and video data.

People learning new concepts can often generalize successfully from just a single example, yet machine learning algorithms typically require tens or hundreds of examples to perform with similar accuracy. People can also use learned concepts in richer ways than conventional algorithms--for action, imagination, and explanation. We present a computational model that captures these human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts: handwritten characters from the world's alphabets. The model represents concepts as simple programs that best explain observed examples under a Bayesian criterion. On a challenging one-shot classification task, the model achieves human-level performance while outperforming recent deep learning approaches.