---
license: cc-by-4.0
task_categories:
- text-generation
- other
language:
- en
tags:
- in-context-learning
- reasoning
- arc-agi
- synthetic
- rule-induction
pretty_name: In-Context Grid Reasoning (ICGR)
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
configs:
- config_name: default
  data_files:
  - split: train
    path: data/train.jsonl
  - split: test
    path: data/test.jsonl
---

# In-Context Grid Reasoning (ICGR)

A small, fully synthetic benchmark for **demonstration-conditioned rule induction**:
each task shows 2–4 `(input grid → output grid)` support pairs that share one
hidden transformation, and the model must apply the same transformation to a
held-out query input.

It targets the same behaviour probed by recent in-context / latent-reasoning work
on ARC-AGI (e.g. *BDH-CQ: In-Context Learning with Recurrent Latent Reasoning*,
[arXiv:2608.09888](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09888)), but is deliberately tiny,
transparent, and license-clean so it can be used freely for quick probes and
ablations.

## Why this exists

ARC-AGI itself is excellent but small and easy to overfit to via public solvers.
ICGR is **procedurally generated from a single script** ([`generate.py`](generate.py)),
so you can:

- regenerate it deterministically (`--seed`),
- scale it up (`--n`),
- know exactly which rule family each task belongs to (for per-concept scoring),
- trust its provenance — no scraped text, images, or third-party datasets, so
  there is no upstream copyright. Released under CC-BY-4.0.

## Format

One JSON object per line.

| field | type | notes |
|---|---|---|
| `task_id` | str | e.g. `icgr-00042` |
| `rule` | str | rule id(s), `+`-joined for compositions |
| `rule_kind` | str | `atomic` or `composed` |
| `rule_description` | str | plain-English statement of the transformation |
| `num_colors` | int | cell alphabet size (4–6) |
| `grid_h`, `grid_w` | int | query/support grid dimensions before the rule |
| `num_support` | int | number of demonstration pairs (2–4) |
| `support` | list | `[{"input": grid, "output": grid}, ...]` |
| `query_input` | str | grid to transform |
| `query_output` | str | expected answer |

Grids are serialised as rows of space-separated integers, rows joined by `;`.
Example: `"1 2 0;0 1 2"` is the 2×3 grid `[[1,2,0],[0,1,2]]`.

```python
from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("WhySoCodius/in-context-grid-reasoning", split="test")
ex = ds[0]
print(ex["rule_description"])
for pair in ex["support"]:
    print(pair["input"], "->", pair["output"])
print("Q:", ex["query_input"], "=>", ex["query_output"])
```

## Rule families

`flip_h`, `flip_v`, `transpose`, `rotate90`, `add_mod` (add constant mod colour
count), `color_swap`, `shift_rows` (cyclic), `tile_h` (self-concat), `border`
(paint outer ring), `max_pool2` (2×2 max). ~35% of tasks compose two of the
size-preserving rules; `rule` records which and in what order.

## Splits

| split | tasks |
|---|---|
| train | 800 |
| test | 200 |

Split is a random shuffle at a fixed seed; the same rule family appears in both.
It is a convenience split, not an adversarial generalisation split — if you need
held-out rules, filter by `rule`.

## Suggested metric

Exact string match on `query_output` after normalising whitespace. Report overall
accuracy plus a breakdown by `rule` and by `rule_kind`.

## Limitations

- Rules are simple and enumerable; a symbolic solver can reach 100%. The point is
  to measure whether a *learning* system infers the rule from demonstrations
  alone, not to be unsolvable.
- Grids are small (3×5 max, 6×6 for pooling) and dense.
- English rule descriptions are templated.

## Reproduce / extend

```bash
python generate.py --n 5000 --seed 123
python test_generate.py   # self-check
```

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{icgr2026,
  title  = {In-Context Grid Reasoning (ICGR): a synthetic benchmark for
            demonstration-conditioned rule induction},
  author = {WhySoCodius},
  year   = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/WhySoCodius/in-context-grid-reasoning}}
}
```

License: [CC-BY-4.0](LICENSE). Attribution appreciated; no other restrictions.