conclusions before--like picturing horse wearing jeansfor instanceor imagining what we' do if we won the lottery this ability to handle hypotheticalsto expand our mental model space far beyond what we can experience directly--to perform abstraction and reasoning--is arguably the defining characteristic of human cognition call it extreme generalizationan ability to adapt to novelnever-before-experienced situations using little data or even no new data at all this stands in sharp contrast with what deep nets dowhich call local generalization (see figure the mapping from inputs to outputs performed by deep net quickly stops making sense if new inputs differ even slightly from what the net saw at training time considerfor instancethe problem of learning the appropriate launch parameters to get rocket to land on the moon if you used deep net for this task and trained it using supervised learning or reinforcement learningyou' have to feed it thousands or even millions of launch trialsyou' need to expose it to dense sampling of the input spacein order for it to learn reliable mapping from input space to output space in contrastas humans we can use our power of abstraction to come up with physical models--rocket science--and derive an exact solution that will land the rocket on the moon in one or few trials similarlyif you developed deep net controlling human bodyand you wanted it to learn to safely navigate city without getting hit by carsthe net would have to die many thousands of times in various situations until it could infer that cars are dangerousand develop appropriate avoidance behaviors dropped into new citythe net would have to relearn most of what it knows on the other handhumans are able to learn safe behaviors without having to die even once--againthanks to our power of abstract modeling of hypothetical situations the same set of data points or experience local generalizationgeneralization power of pattern recognition extreme generalizationgeneralization power achieved via abstraction and reasoning figure local generalizat ion vs extreme generalizat ion in shortdespite our progress on machine perceptionwe're still far from humanlevel ai our models can only perform local generalizationadapting to new situations that must be similar to past datawhereas human cognition is capable of licensed to