Seeking the Unfamiliar but Memorable: Conceptual Creativity as Meta-Learning
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 Apprais...
| Authors | Mengye Ren |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 15 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 May 2026 |
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