Analogy making as amortised model construction

David G Nagy, Tingke Shen, Hanqi Zhou, Charley M Wu, Peter Dayan

Keywords: analogy, compositional representations, frame problem, construal, amortized inference

Abstract: Humans flexibly construct internal models to navigate novel situations. To be useful, these internal models must be sufficiently faithful to the environment that resource-limited planning leads to adequate outcomes; equally, they must be tractable to construct in the first place.We argue that analogy plays a central role in these processes, enabling agents to reuse solution-relevant structure from past experiences and amortise the computational costs of both model construction/construal and planning. Formalising analogies as partial homomorphisms between Markov decision processes, we sketch a framework in which abstract modules, derived from previous construals, serve as composable building blocks for new situation models. This modular reuse allows for flexible adaptation of policies and representations across domains with shared structural essence.

Submission Number: 15