Intuition vectors

Abstract

Large self-supervised vision models learn representations that support scene segmentation and the semantic decomposition of physical objects. We ask whether their representational geometry supports transfer to visual reasoning problems without any task-specific fine-tuning. We hypothesized that relational representations may bridge perception and abstract reasoning by encoding similarities and transformations among visual inputs such that an intuitive, implicit form of reasoning may be performed via latent vector arithmetic. Specifically, we examine DINOv3, MAE, and random pixel projections on abstract and naturalistic Bongard problems, ARC-AGI-1 and ARC-AGI-2, and novel ARC-GEN instances. On both Bongard benchmarks, the accuracy of a simple nearest-centroid readout of frozen visual embeddings is within four percentage points of the task-specific baselines reported with the original benchmarks. In ARC, latent difference vectors summarizing demonstration input-output transformations, which we refer to as intuition vectors, show greater alignment with test vectors from the same task, whereas those from unrelated tasks are near orthogonal. This latent geometry is operational: transporting a query along its intuition vector consistently improves exact-output retrieval, reaching 70.7 on ARC-AGI-2 evaluation. Across 397,000 ARC-GEN instances from 794 tasks, single-pair intuition vectors identify the generating task with approximately 87\% leave-one-out accuracy. These findings suggest that latent vector arithmetic over frozen visual representations supports implicit rule inference across varied problem domains without a generative model component, indicating that inferring an abstract transformation and generating its instance-specific consequence may be separable capacities.