arXiv AI
Sep 30

Reasoning with Neural Cellular Automata

The paper investigates Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs), which are networks of recurrent cells that rely on local connectivity and asynchronous updates. It demonstrates that NCAs can solve complex visual reasoning tasks such as large mazes, Sudoku, and ARC-AGI-1, and that they generalize to larger grids, longer rollouts, and parallel trials. The study also shows that training with sample replay and stochastic perturbations enhances generalization, and that NCAs can recover from damage and scale to raw pixel reasoning.

By Mayalen Etcheverry, Pietro Miotti, Aidan Sirbu, Konstantin Sch\"urholt, Mariia Drozdova, Arna Ghosh, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, James Manyika, Blake Richards, Eyvind Niklasson
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 21

Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 19669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage.

By Haoqiang Kang, Yinpeng Chen, Luyang Liu, Jesper Sparre Andersen, Abhijit Ogale, Baochen Sun, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Flow Reasoning Models: Turning Flows Into Efficient Recurrent Reasoners

Flow Reasoning Models (FRMs) are a new framework that turns continuous flow models into efficient recurrent reasoners for structured tasks. By self‑conditioning a flow model on its own past outputs, FRMs iteratively refine solutions, allowing parallel decision making and revision. The authors introduce Fixed‑Point Forcing (FPF) to mitigate exposure bias at deeper recursion, and report near‑perfect solve rates on Sudoku‑Extreme, Zebra, and Maze‑Unique, outperforming existing masked‑diffusion and specialized baselines while using far fewer inference FLOPs.

By Alec Helbling, Andrey Bryutkin, Mauro Martino, Duen Horng Chau, Nima Dehmamy, Hendrik Strobelt