Cross-Image Context Matters for Bongard Problems
Nikhil Raghuraman Adam W. Harley Leonidas Guibas
Current machine learning methods struggle to solve Bongard problems, which
are a type of IQ test that requires deriving an abstract "concept" from a set
of positive and negative "support" images, and then classifying whether or not
a new query image depicts the key concept. On Bongard-HOI, a benchmark for
natural-image Bongard problems, existing methods have only reached 66% accuracy
(where chance is 50%). Low accuracy is often attributed to neural nets' lack of
ability to find human-like symbolic rules. In this work, we point out that many
existing methods are forfeiting accuracy due to a much simpler problem: they do
not incorporate information contained in the support set as a whole, and rely
instead on information extracted from individual supports. This is a critical
issue, because unlike in few-shot learning tasks concerning object
classification, the "key concept" in a typical Bongard problem can only be
distinguished using multiple positives and multiple negatives. We explore a
variety of simple methods to take this cross-image context into account, and
demonstrate substantial gains over prior methods, leading to new
state-of-the-art performance on Bongard-LOGO (75.3%) and Bongard-HOI (72.45%)
and strong performance on the original Bongard problem set (60.84%).