System 2 Reasoning for Human-AI Alignment: Generality and Adaptivity via ARC-AGI

Abstract

Despite their broad applicability, transformer-based models still fall short in System~2 reasoning, lacking the generality and adaptivity needed for human--AI alignment. We examine weaknesses on ARC-AGI tasks, revealing gaps in compositional generalization and novel-rule adaptation, and argue that closing these gaps requires overhauling the reasoning pipeline and its evaluation. We propose three research axes: (1) Symbolic representation pipeline for compositional generality, (2) Interactive feedback-driven reasoning loop for adaptivity, and (3) Test-time task augmentation balancing both qualities. Finally, we demonstrate how ARC-AGI's evaluation suite can be adapted to track progress in symbolic generality, feedback-driven adaptivity, and task-level robustness, thereby guiding future work on robust human--AI alignment.