Cognitive Predictive Coding Network: Rethinking the Generalization in Raven's Progressive Matrices

Abstract visual reasoning, exemplified by Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM), remains a significant challenge in artificial intelligence. A critical difficulty lies in disentangling abstract relational rules from image-specific features, as these rules operate independently of visual appearances. To address this challenge, we propose the Cognitive Predictive Coding Network (CPCN), inspired by predictive coding theory from cognitive science. CPCN features a three-component architecture: a Relation Disentangler that separates abstract rules from image-specific features through prediction error minimization; Stacked Free Energy Minimizers (FEMs) that leverage energy minimization principles to progressively reduce uncertainty during hierarchical abstraction; and a classifier for solution identification. Unlike previous approaches, our model employs mutual information constraints to explicitly separate relation-relevant and relation-irrelevant features, enabling more robust pattern recognition. Our novel FEMs provide a principled approach to uncertainty reduction through iterative refinement of pattern understanding. Experiments demonstrate PAH's superior performance across multiple benchmarks (such as 98.9% on RAVEN-Fair) with state-of-the-art 59.7% average accuracy across all PGM subtasks.