  Logical reasoning tasks over symbols, such as learning arithmetic operations
and computer program evaluations, have become challenges to deep learning. In
particular, even state-of-the-art neural networks fail to achieve
\textit{out-of-distribution} (OOD) generalization of symbolic reasoning tasks,
whereas humans can easily extend learned symbolic rules. To resolve this
difficulty, we propose a neural sequence-to-grid (seq2grid) module, an input
preprocessor that automatically segments and aligns an input sequence into a
grid. As our module outputs a grid via a novel differentiable mapping, any
neural network structure taking a grid input, such as ResNet or TextCNN, can be
jointly trained with our module in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments
show that neural networks having our module as an input preprocessor achieve
OOD generalization on various arithmetic and algorithmic problems including
number sequence prediction problems, algebraic word problems, and computer
program evaluation problems while other state-of-the-art sequence transduction
models cannot. Moreover, we verify that our module enhances TextCNN to solve
the bAbI QA tasks without external memory.
