Compositional Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
We study structured abstraction-based reasoning for the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) and compare its generalization to test-time approaches. Purely neural architectures lack reliable combinatorial generalization, while strictly symbolic systems struggle with perceptual grounding. We therefore propose a neuro-symbolic architecture that extracts object-level structure from grids, uses neural priors to propose candidate transformations from a fixed domain-specific language (DSL) of atomic patterns, and filters hypotheses using cross-example consistency. Instantiated as a compositional reasoning framework based on unit patterns inspired by human visual abstraction, the system augments large language models (LLMs) with object representations and transformation proposals. On ARC-AGI-2, it improves base LLM performance from 16% to 24.4% on the public evaluation set, and to 30.8% when combined with ARC Lang Solver via a meta-classifier. These results demonstrate that separating perception, neural-guided transformation proposal, and symbolic consistency filtering improves generalization without task-specific finetuning or reinforcement learning, while reducing reliance on brute-force search and sampling-based test-time scaling. We open-source the ARC-AGI-2 Reasoner code (https://github.com/CoreThink-AI/arc-agi-2-reasoner).
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 7 of its 25 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2026.
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References · 7
- 2020Scaling Laws for Neural Language Modelscited by 6,411
- 2018Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networkscited by 1,341
- 2022STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With Reasoningcited by 895
- 2020On the Binding Problem in Artificial Neural Networkscited by 230
- 2018Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisalcited by 214
- 2019Neural-Symbolic Computing: An Effective Methodology for Principled Integration of Machine Learning and Reasoningcited by 149
- 2019On the Measure of Intelligencecited by 129
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- 2024Neural networks for abstraction and reasoning: Towards broad generalization in machines
- 2025NSA: Neuro-symbolic ARC Challenge
- 2023LLMs and the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus: Successes, Failures, and the Importance of Object-based Representations
- 2023Dynamic MOdularized Reasoning for Compositional Structured Explanation Generation
- 2025NePTune: A Neuro-Pythonic Framework for Tunable Compositional Reasoning on Vision-Language
- 2026A Multi-Stage Rule-Chaining Framework for Compositional and Interpretable Cognitive Reasoning
- 2019Learning by Abstraction: The Neural State Machine
- 2025Emergent Symbolic Mechanisms Support Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models