Compositional Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning

Abstract

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 checks. 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 over the base solver LLM (Grok-4, 16.0%) to 24.4% on the public evaluation set, and to 30.8% when combined with ARC Lang Solver via a meta-classifier. These results support the claim that in the evaluated settings, allocating test-time compute to object abstraction, neural-guided transformation proposal, and consistency filtering can improve accuracy over unstructured sampling-based scaling without task-specific finetuning of the system. We open-source the code: (https://github.com/CoreThink-AI/arc-agi-2-reasoner).