{"pk":29834,"title":"Relational reasoning and generalization using non-symbolic neural networks","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Humans have a remarkable capacity to reason about abstract relational structures, an ability that may support some ofthe most impressive, human-unique cognitive feats. Equality (or identity) reasoning has been a key case study of abstractrelational reasoning. This paper revisits the question of whether equality can be learned in non-symbolic neural networks.We find that simple neural networks are able to learn basic equality with relatively little training data. In a second casestudy, we show that sequential equality problems (learning ABA sequences) can be solved with only positive traininginstances. Finally, we consider a more complex, hierarchical equality problem, and find that this task can be solved witheither avast amount of training data or pre-training on basic equality. Overall, these findings indicate that neural modelsare able to solve equality-based reasoning tasks, suggesting that essential aspects of symbolic reasoning can emerge fromdata-driven,non-symbolic learning processes.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Poster Session 2","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/07g9963b","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Atticus","middle_name":"","last_name":"Geiger","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Alexandra","middle_name":"","last_name":"Carstensen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Christopher","middle_name":"","last_name":"Potts","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29834/galley/19688/download/"}]}