instructions.md

arc-task-gen

Generate original ARC-AGI-1-style tasks whose distribution matches the public ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set, for evaluating a model on problems it cannot have memorised.

The public ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set appears in web-scraped training corpora, so a model's score on it is an upper bound on genuine few-shot rule induction. This tool builds a private set with the same measurable properties, so the two scores are comparable.

tasks.json uses the standard ARC {"train": [...], "test": [...]} shape, so any ARC harness can consume it.

Install

pixi install
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...

Works against any OpenAI-compatible chat-completions endpoint:

export OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8000/v1   # vLLM, Ollama, LM Studio, ...
export ARCGEN_MODEL=your-model
export ARCGEN_EMBED_MODEL=your-embedding-model

The generation model has to emit strict JSON while holding five numeric constraints at once. Parse failures are retried, so a weaker model costs extra calls. A 400-task run on gpt-5.6 logged 27 parse failures across 758 calls.

Use

python describe_eval_tasks.py            # once, ~5 min, caches eval rule descriptions
python generate_tasks.py --n 400         # generate a task set matched on size/colour/pair-count

The ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set downloads automatically on first run.

describe_eval_tasks.py is optional. It enables the check that removes generated tasks too similar to real evaluation tasks; without it that filter is skipped with a warning.

For tighter matching — each task conditioned on one public eval task's shape sequence and Chollet category, optionally stratified evenly across transformation mechanics — label the eval set once and use generate_tasks_stratified.py instead of generate_tasks.py:

python label_eval_tasks.py                                            # once, labels category + mechanic
python generate_tasks_stratified.py --n 400                           # category-matched
python generate_tasks_stratified.py --mechanics all --per-mechanic 25 # mechanic-stratified

It wraps generate_tasks.py and reuses its whole generation loop, so everything below still applies. --dry-run-plan inspects the sampled anchor/mechanic plan without calling the API.

Output lands in data/generations/gen_<timestamp>/ (data/generations_stratified/... for the latter):

file	contents
tasks.json	all tasks, keyed by id
separated/<id>.json	one file per task, loads in the ARC testing interface
sanity_check.json	distribution comparison, rule descriptions, slot provenance, per-round filter history

Data folder

path	contents	committed?
data/arc_agi_eval.json	the 400-task ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set	no — downloaded on first run
data/arc_agi_eval_descriptions.json	one rule description per eval task	no — built by describe_eval_tasks.py
data/arc_agi_eval_categories.json	one Chollet category + mechanic per eval task	no — built by label_eval_tasks.py
data/generations/, data/generations_stratified/	your generated task sets, one timestamped folder per run	no

Nothing here is committed: the eval set and its labels are cheaply rebuilt (downloaded or regenerated), and generated task sets are deliberately kept private — the benchmark's value is that no model has seen the tasks, and publishing them puts them into web-scraped training corpora and burns them.

Measured output

A 400-task run on gpt-5.6 (the default generation model; see Install) against the 400-task public evaluation set:

property	Public Evaluation Set	generated
input area, mean	226.92	224.70
input area, median	144.00	144.00
input rows, mean	13.23	13.19
input cols, mean	13.70	13.67
colours, mean	5.35	5.24
demonstration pairs ≥ 4	34.2%	34.8%
test pairs = 2	4.8%	5.0%

How it works

One task per call

Each API call requests exactly one task, with up to MAX_WORKERS calls in flight at once. This is a deliberate constraint: asking a single call to return several tasks at once measurably shrinks them, because the model spends roughly a fixed effort budget per response and divides it across however many tasks it was asked for. In a gpt-5.6 test requesting 32 tasks per response, mean grid area was 14 cells, against 208 cells for the official evaluation set, and the ~225-cell mean this tool gets at one task per call (see Measured output).

Joint constraint sampling

Each call is assigned a slot drawn wholesale from a single randomly chosen evaluation task:

{'rows': 26, 'cols': 18, 'colors': 3, 'n_train': 4, 'n_test': 1, 'anchor': '3490cc26'}

Novelty filtering

Duplicates are caught by semantic similarity. The model writes a one-sentence rule description for each task; those descriptions are embedded and compared by cosine similarity. Any task scoring at or above DEDUP_THRESHOLD against another generated task is regenerated.

A second filter compares the same descriptions against descriptions of the real evaluation tasks and regenerates anything at or above EVAL_SIMILARITY_THRESHOLD. It needs describe_eval_tasks.py to have run.

Termination

The loop exits when nothing needs removing. MAX_DEDUP_ROUNDS defaults to max(8, ceil(3·log2(N))) as a backstop, plus a stall detector that stops after three rounds without a decrease in removals.

Validation

Structural checks (rectangular grids, cell values 0–9) run inside the loop, and malformed tasks are removed and regenerated alongside duplicates.

Configuration

Name	Default	Meaning
--n	32	tasks to generate
--max-rounds	max(8, ceil(3·log2(N)))	novelty-loop ceiling
MAX_WORKERS	64	concurrent calls
DEDUP_THRESHOLD	0.80	min similarity to another generated task at which one is regenerated
EVAL_SIMILARITY_THRESHOLD	0.92	min similarity to a real evaluation task at which a generated task is regenerated
MAX_STALL_ROUNDS	3	rounds without progress before stopping

Caveats

Solvability is not verified programmatically

Structural validation checks shape and colour range. Nothing confirms a rule is inferable from its training pairs alone. In one hand-checked blind sample of 20 tasks, 19 were solvable. Sample your own before trusting a score.

Duplicate detection is bounded by wording

Two tasks sharing a mechanism but described differently fall below DEDUP_THRESHOLD and both survive. Which task survives a cluster is arbitrary: the first in union-find order.

Generated task ids leak their rules

Names like diagonal_corner_echo come from the model. Renumber before showing tasks to a human solver, and note that sanity_check.json contains the intended rule for every task.

Attribution

The ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set is downloaded from fchollet/ARC-AGI (Apache 2.0) and used as the reference distribution. It is not redistributed here.

MIT licensed.