KANDINSKYPatterns -- An experimental exploration environment for Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Abstract: Machine intelligence is very successful at standard recognition tasks when having high-quality training data. There is still a significant gap between machine-level pattern recognition and human-level concept learning. Humans can learn under uncertainty from only a few examples and generalize these concepts to solve new problems. The growing interest in explainable machine intelligence, requires experimental environments and diagnostic tests to analyze weaknesses in existing approaches to drive progress in the field. In this paper, we discuss existing diagnostic tests and test data sets such as CLEVR, CLEVERER, CLOSURE, CURI, Bongard-LOGO, V-PROM, and present our own experimental environment: The KANDINSKYPatterns, named after the Russian artist Wassily Kandinksy, who made theoretical contributions to compositivity, i.e. that all perceptions consist of geometrically elementary individual components. This was experimentally proven by Hubel &Wiesel in the 1960s and became the basis for machine learning approaches such as the Neocognitron and the even later Deep Learning. While KANDINSKYPatterns have computationally controllable properties on the one hand, bringing ground truth, they are also easily distinguishable by human observers, i.e., controlled patterns can be described by both humans and algorithms, making them another important contribution to international research in machine intelligence.