arXiv — Machine Learning · · 3 min read

Seeking the Unfamiliar but Memorable: Conceptual Creativity as Meta-Learning

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2605.16477 (cs)
[Submitted on 15 May 2026]

Title:Seeking the Unfamiliar but Memorable: Conceptual Creativity as Meta-Learning

Authors:Mengye Ren
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Abstract:What does it mean to create a new concept, rather than retrieve a familiar one? Repeatedly sampling a generative model at the same prompt produces variations with similar styles and typical content. We propose that creativity is the production of stimuli that are unfamiliar to an adaptive observer at first sight, but quickly learnable from a few exposures. We formalize this as a Creator-Appraiser pair: a Creator generates a candidate, an Appraiser adapts to it for a few inner-loop learning steps, and the Appraiser's improvement becomes the reward the Creator optimizes through. We instantiate the framework with diffusion as the Creator, an autoencoder Appraiser on MNIST, and a CLIP Appraiser with a low-rank adapter for natural images. The diffusion model remains frozen with no additional language conditioning; the meta-learning gradient is enough to produce both stylistic variations and concept compositions that the base model does not generate on its own.
Comments: 25 pages
Subjects: Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.16477 [cs.LG]
  (or arXiv:2605.16477v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16477
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Mengye Ren [view email]
[v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 16:09:56 UTC (7,231 KB)
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