Tackling the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) with Object-Centric Models and the MDL Principle

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a challenging benchmark, introduced to foster AI research towards human-like intelligence. It is a collection of unique tasks about generating colored grids, specified by a few examples only. In contrast to the transformation-based programs of existing work, we introduce object-centric models that are in line with the natural programs produced by humans. Our models can not only perform predictions, but also provide joint descriptions for input/output pairs. The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle is used to efficiently search the large model space. A diverse range of tasks are solved, and the learned models are similar to natural programs.