# A Qualitative Comparative Evaluation of Cognitive and Generative Theories

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03453 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03453/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02427/) (2023)
- [Explainability for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01029/) (2023)
- [An Introduction to Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12560/) (2018)
- [Efficient Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03863/) (2023)
- [Centaur: a foundation model of human cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20268/) (2024)
- [Synergistic Integration of Large Language Models and Cognitive Architectures for Robust AI: An Exploratory Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09830/) (2023)
- [The SP theory of intelligence: an overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.3888/) (2013)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Evaluation is a critical activity associated with any theory. Yet this has proven to be an exceptionally challenging activity for theories based on cognitive architectures. For an overlapping set of reasons, evaluation can also be challenging for theories based on generative neural architectures. This dual challenge is approached here by leveraging a broad perspective on theory evaluation to yield a wide-ranging, albeit qualitative, comparison of whole-mind-oriented cognitive and generative architectures and the full systems that are based on these architectures.