Papers › Do Large Language Models Solve ARC Visual Analogies Like People Do?

Do Large Language Models Solve ARC Visual Analogies Like People Do?

13 Mar 2024arXiv:2403.09734archive 2025-07-28

Gustaw Opiełka, Hannes Rosenbusch, Veerle Vijverberg, Claire E. Stevenson

The Abstraction Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a visual analogical reasoning test designed for humans and machines (Chollet, 2019). We compared human and large language model (LLM) performance on a new child-friendly set of ARC items. Results show that both children and adults outperform most LLMs on these tasks. Error analysis revealed a similar "fallback" solution strategy in LLMs and young children, where part of the analogy is simply copied. In addition, we found two other error types, one based on seemingly grasping key concepts (e.g., Inside-Outside) and the other based on simple combinations of analogy input matrices. On the whole, "concept" errors were more common in humans, and "matrix" errors were more common in LLMs. This study sheds new light on LLM reasoning ability and the extent to which we can use error analyses and comparisons with human development to understand how LLMs solve visual analogies.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

cstevenson-uva/kidsarc officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ARCLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelVisual Analogies

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

SET

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections