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Thought without systematicity? Evaluating reasoning models on rule induction tasks

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 12, 2026 · UTC

A central tenet of human cognition is systematicity, the principle that understanding one concept is inherently tied to understanding close variations of that concept. Do reasoning models robustly exhibit such systematicity? If so, we would expect consistent performance on structurally equivalent variants of the same task. Here, we extend established rule induction tasks from cognitive science to assess the systematicity of thought in current reasoning models. Each task family has compositional structure that we use to create structurally equivalent task variations through task isomorphisms su

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