# Structural Grid Descriptors Predict Within-Task Solver Success on ARC-AGI Source: [Structural Grid Descriptors Predict Within-Task Solver Success on ARC-AGI]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-06-11T05:00:14.404Z Authors: Ayan Pendharkar Published: 2026-06-08T04:51:24.000Z ## Abstract We ask whether structural properties of intermediate grid states predict whether a symbolic ARC-AGI solver will succeed, framed as a test of conditional mutual information I(X;Y\|task) \> 0. Across 44,800 runs spanning two architecturally distinct solvers (beam search and Stochastic DFS), 400 ARC tasks, 28 configurations per solver, and both training and evaluation splits, hand-crafted grid descriptors measured at 50% trajectory completion discriminate successful from failed runs within the same task (mean within-task best-feature AUC = 0.885, p \< 0.001 under within-task label permutation). Most predictive content lies along a single grid-complexity axis. The result generalizes across solver architectures: a feature selected on one solver predicts success on the other with AUC 0.747-0.762 in all four transfer directions (p \< 0.001, leakage controlled). On a pre-registered held-out set of 41 reliable tasks, the frozen feature n\_components\_final achieves AUC = 0.765 (95% CI \[0.717, 0.810\], p \< 0.001), robust under task-clustered bootstrap resampling and cross-solver task collapsing. The signal is not explained by solver capacity (configuration-residualized AUC = 0.927 and 0.896 for beam search and SDFS, p \< 0.001) and is only weakly coupled to score trajectories (R^2 approximately 0). Early stopping at 50% completion reduces beam-search compute by 33.6% while retaining 98.9% of solves; degenerate-trajectory detection reduces SDFS compute by 65.3% with no solve loss. Finally, on 229 of 400 evaluation tasks the DSL primitive library produces no valid transition from the input grid. This 0-step collapse is invariant to search budget and universally failed by beam search, indicating a DSL coverage limitation rather than a search-budget effect. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Task performance prediction on Task-solver pool (held-out)](): Task performance prediction; Task-solver pool (held-out); AUC: 80.2. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()