# An Approach to Solving the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) Challenge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.03553 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03553/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 16 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17580/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01910/) (2022)
- [Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10005/) (2022)
- [How Many Data Points is a Prompt Worth?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08493/) (2021)
- [Visual Question Answering: A Survey of Methods and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.05910/) (2016)
- [Learning, Fast and Slow: A Goal-Directed Memory-Based Approach for Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13758/) (2023)
- [Brick Tic-Tac-Toe: Exploring the Generalizability of AlphaZero to Novel Test Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05991/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Large Language Model (LLM) as a System of Multiple Expert Agents: An Approach to solve the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05146/) (2023)
- [Understanding LLMs' Fluid Intelligence Deficiency: An Analysis of the ARC Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07190/) (2025)
- [From Reasoning to Generalization: Knowledge-Augmented LLMs for ARC Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17482/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We utilise the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), in particular GPT4, to be prompt engineered into performing an arbitrary task. Here, we give the model some human priors via text, along with some typical procedures for solving the ARC tasks, and ask it to generate the i) broad description of the input-output relation, ii) detailed steps of the input-output mapping, iii) use the detailed steps to perform manipulation on the test input and derive the test output. The current GPT3.5/GPT4 prompt solves 2 out of 4 tested small ARC challenges (those with small grids of 8x8 and below). With tweaks to the prompt to make it more specific for the use case, it can solve more. We posit that when scaled to a multi-agent system with usage of past memory and equipped with an image interpretation tool via Visual Question Answering, we may actually be able to solve the majority of the ARC challenge