Synthesizing symbolic models of human and machine reasoning at scale

arXiv:2611.07088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symbolic models offer a powerful account of cognition, but their scope has historically been limited by the need for hand-engineering and computational tractability. We show how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) can scale symbolic modeling and help overcome these engineering limitations. We introduce Behavior-Conditioned Symbolic Synthesis (BCSS)---an approach for automated search of interpretable, deterministic symbolic programs that verifiably reproduce behavior---and apply it to model both human and machine behavior across hundreds of challenging reasoning problems.