Beyond Statistical Learning: Exact Learning Is Essential for General Intelligence

This paper argues that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), particularly for tasks requiring deductive reasoning, demands a fundamental shift from statistical learning to exact learning. Current AI systems, based on statistical methods, excel on average but consistently fail on straightforward deductive tasks due to their inherent design, which optimizes for statistical performance over distributions. This leads to unreliable behavior and "statistical shortcuts", where models perform well on training data but poorly on slightly different inputs. The authors propose that exact learning, which requires universal correctness on all well-formed inputs, is crucial for achieving truly reliable and safe AI systems, despite the challenges in its implementation and verification. They suggest approaches like changing learning algorithms, curating teaching sets, and transforming tasks to facilitate this paradigm shift.