CURI: A Benchmark for Productive Concept Learning Under Uncertainty

Abstract

Humans can learn and reason under substantial uncertainty in a space of infinitely many concepts, including structured relational concepts ("a scene with objects that have the same color") and ad-hoc categories defined through goals ("objects that could fall on one's head"). In contrast, standard classification benchmarks: 1) consider only a fixed set of category labels, 2) do not evaluate compositional concept learning and 3) do not explicitly capture a notion of reasoning under uncertainty. We introduce a new few-shot, meta-learning benchmark, Compositional Reasoning Under Uncertainty (CURI) to bridge this gap. CURI evaluates different aspects of productive and systematic generalization, including abstract understandings of disentangling, productive generalization, learning boolean operations, variable binding, etc. Importantly, it also defines a model-independent "compositionality gap" to evaluate the difficulty of generalizing out-of-distribution along each of these axes. Extensive evaluations across a range of modeling choices spanning different modalities (image, schemas, and sounds), splits, privileged auxiliary concept information, and choices of negatives reveal substantial scope for modeling advances on the proposed task. All code and datasets will be available online.