  Human reasoning is grounded in an ability to identify highly abstract
commonalities governing superficially dissimilar visual inputs. Recent efforts
to develop algorithms with this capacity have largely focused on approaches
that require extensive direct training on visual reasoning tasks, and yield
limited generalization to problems with novel content. In contrast, a long
tradition of research in cognitive science has focused on elucidating the
computational principles underlying human analogical reasoning; however, this
work has generally relied on manually constructed representations. Here we
present visiPAM (visual Probabilistic Analogical Mapping), a model of visual
reasoning that synthesizes these two approaches. VisiPAM employs learned
representations derived directly from naturalistic visual inputs, coupled with
a similarity-based mapping operation derived from cognitive theories of human
reasoning. We show that without any direct training, visiPAM outperforms a
state-of-the-art deep learning model on an analogical mapping task. In
addition, visiPAM closely matches the pattern of human performance on a novel
task involving mapping of 3D objects across disparate categories.
