In-distribution accuracy does not predict abstract reasoning transfer in small models

Across more than 1,000 supervised fine-tuning runs on ARC-TGI, decoder-only, encoder-decoder, and mixture-of-experts models degraded sharply under grid-scale and cross-benchmark shifts.

Big Tech
Nur A Zarin Nishat · Jens Lehmann · Andrei Aioanei · Sahar Vahdati

Leibniz University of Hanover · TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library · Amazon

Research Digest··2 min read
Nishat et al.

ARC-TGI represents each transformation as a task-family generator that resamples colors, positions, object configurations, and grid sizes.

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From Amazon and 2 others

In one line

Small language models can score well on abstract reasoning benchmarks without acquiring transferable rules; performance degrades sharply under shifts such as grid-scale changes.

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