Papers › Pointer Value Retrieval: A new benchmark for understanding the limits of neural...
Pointer Value Retrieval: A new benchmark for understanding the limits of neural network generalization
Chiyuan Zhang, Maithra Raghu, Jon Kleinberg, Samy Bengio
Central to the success of artificial neural networks is their ability to generalize. But does neural network generalization primarily rely on seeing highly similar training examples (memorization)? Or are neural networks capable of human-intelligence styled reasoning, and if so, to what extent? These remain fundamental open questions on artificial neural networks. In this paper, as steps towards answering these questions, we introduce a new benchmark, Pointer Value Retrieval (PVR) to study the limits of neural network reasoning. The PVR suite of tasks is based on reasoning about indirection, a hallmark of human intelligence, where a first stage (task) contains instructions for solving a second stage (task). In PVR, this is done by having one part of the task input act as a pointer, giving instructions on a different input location, which forms the output. We show this simple rule can be applied to create a diverse set of tasks across different input modalities and configurations. Importantly, this use of indirection enables systematically varying task difficulty through distribution shifts and increasing functional complexity. We conduct a detailed empirical study of different PVR tasks, discovering large variations in performance across dataset sizes, neural network architectures and task complexity. Further, by incorporating distribution shift and increased functional complexity, we develop nuanced tests for reasoning, revealing subtle failures and surprising successes, suggesting many promising directions of exploration on this benchmark.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
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