What Do Current Systematic Generalization Tasks Miss? A Reasoning-Centered Analysis

Abstract

Systematic generalization, the ability to solve novel problems by recombining known atomic elements, is central to human intelligence but difficult to study rigorously under controlled settings. Existing studies therefore rely on simplifications such as elemental composition, productivity-based tests, and action-explicit goals, which make systematic generalization easier to study but omit some essential aspects of this capability. To characterize what these simplifications miss, we adopt a reasoning-centered lens and introduce TranSGrid, a testbed that brings deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning together within a unified task. Experiments with seven Transformer models on 4,800 TranSGrid instances show that all models perform much worse on TranSGrid than on a held-out test set: the largest model solves 79.6% of the test set, but only 55.3% of TranSGrid and 15.8% of the hardest subset. The gap remains within the training length range, showing that productivity alone is not sufficient to evaluate systematic generalization. Additionally, we reintroduce the other two simplifications into TranSGrid: one variant limits interactions among action effects to approximate elemental composition (reducing the inductive demand); the other makes goals action-explicit (reducing the abductive one). In both, solve rates return to roughly the test set level, showing that either simplification alone is enough to reduce TranSGrid to an ordinary held-out test set. Together, our results show that existing tasks reduce either or both of the inductive and abductive demands of systematic generalization, and that comprehensively measuring this capability requires a task that involves all three forms of reasoning.