# Structural Ranking of the Cognitive Plausibility of Computational Models of Analogy and Metaphors with the Minimal Cognitive Grid

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01359/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
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- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
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- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
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- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01696/) (2016)
- [Emergent Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09196/) (2022)
- [LVLM-eHub: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09265/) (2023)
- [ARC-AGI-2: A New Challenge for Frontier AI Reasoning Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11831/) (2025)
- [LAMM: Language-Assisted Multi-Modal Instruction-Tuning Dataset, Framework, and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06687/) (2023)
- [MME-Survey: A Comprehensive Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15296/) (2024)
- [Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models: In-Depth Analysis on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11793/) (2024)
- [Achieving >97% on GSM8K: Deeply Understanding the Problems Makes LLMs Better Solvers for Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14963/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Robustness of Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14215/) (2024)
- [Analogy Generation by Prompting Large Language Models: A Case Study of InstructGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04186/) (2022)
- [StoryAnalogy: Deriving Story-level Analogies from Large Language Models to Unlock Analogical Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12874/) (2023)
- [Fluid Transformers and Creative Analogies: Exploring Large Language Models' Capacity for Augmenting Cross-Domain Analogical Creativity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12832/) (2023)
- [The simulation of judgment in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04426/) (2025)
- [Towards a Quantum-Like Cognitive Architecture for Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05176/) (2019)
- [LLMs as Models for Analogical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13803/) (2024)
- [Response: Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16118/) (2023)
- [Do large language models solve verbal analogies like children do?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20384/) (2023)
- [AnaloBench: Benchmarking the Identification of Abstract and Long-context Analogies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12370/) (2024)
- [Beneath Surface Similarity: Large Language Models Make Reasonable Scientific Analogies after Structure Abduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12660/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we employ the Minimal Cognitive Grid (MCG), a framework created to evaluate the cognitive plausibility of artificial systems, to offer a systematic assessment of leading computational models of analogy and metaphor, including the Structure-Mapping Engine (SME), CogSketch, METCL, and Large Language Models (LLMs). We present a formal and quantitative operationalization of the MCG framework and, through the analysis of its three main dimensions (Functional/Structural Ratio, Generality, and Performance Match), examine how well each system aligns with standard cognitive theories of the modeled phenomena, thus allowing for comparison of the models with respect to their cognitive plausibility, according to consistent and generalizable mathematical criteria.
