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arXiv · 2509.05249

COGITAO: A Visual Reasoning Framework To Study Compositionality & Generalization

Abstract

The ability to compose learned concepts and apply them in novel settings is key to human intelligence, but remains a persistent limitation in state-of-the-art machine learning models. To address this issue, we introduce COGITAO, a modular and extensible data generation framework and benchmark designed to systematically study compositionality and generalization in visual domains. Drawing inspiration from ARC-AGI's problem-setting, COGITAO constructs rule-based tasks which apply a set of transformations to objects in grid-like environments. It supports composition, at adjustable depth, over a set of 28 interoperable transformations, along with extensive control over grid parametrization and object properties. This flexibility enables the creation of millions of unique task rules -- surpassing concurrent datasets by several orders of magnitude -- across a wide range of difficulties, while allowing virtually unlimited sample generation per rule. We provide baseline experiments using state-of-the-art vision models, highlighting their consistent failures to generalize to novel combinations of familiar elements, despite strong in-domain performance. COGITAO is fully open-sourced, including all code and datasets, to support continued research in this field.

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BibTeXRIS

Yassine Taoudi-Benchekroun, Klim Troyan, Pascal Sager, Stefan Gerber, Lukas Tuggener, Benjamin Grewe. 2026-02-17. COGITAO: A Visual Reasoning Framework To Study Compositionality & Generalization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05249

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