溯因推理是对最合理解释的推理。例如，如果珍妮下班回家后发现家里一片狼借，她记得自己开着一扇窗户，她可以假设一个小偷闯入了她的房子，并造成了混乱，这是最合理的解释。虽然溯因一直被认为是人们如何解释和阅读自然语言字里行间的核心（Hobbs et al.，1988年），在支持溯因自然语言推理和生成方面的研究相对较少。我们提出的第一项研究，调查基于语言的溯因推理的可行性。我们引入了一个挑战数据集ART，它由超过20 k个常识性的叙事上下文和200 k个解释组成。基于这个数据集，我们概念化两个新的任务-（i）外展NLI：一个多项选择问答任务，选择更可能的解释，和（ii）外展NLG：一个条件生成任务，解释给定的观察自然语言。在外展NLI上，最佳模型的准确率为68.9%，远低于人类的91.4%。在外展NLG上，目前最好的语言生成器甚至更加挣扎，因为它们缺乏对人类来说微不足道的推理能力。我们的分析导致了对深度预训练的语言模型未能执行的推理类型的新见解-尽管它们在相关但定义更窄的NLI任务上表现出色-为未来的研究指明了有趣的途径。
英文摘要：
Abductive reasoning is inference to the most plausible explanation. For example, if Jenny finds her house in a mess when she returns from work, and remembers that she left a window open, she can hypothesize that a thief broke into her house and caused the mess, as the most plausible explanation. While abduction has long been considered to be at the core of how people interpret and read between the lines in natural language (Hobbs et al., 1988), there has been relatively little research in support of abductive natural language inference and generation. We present the first study that investigates the viability of language-based abductive reasoning. We introduce a challenge dataset, ART, that consists of over 20k commonsense narrative contexts and 200k explanations. Based on this dataset, we conceptualize two new tasks -- (i) Abductive NLI: a multiple-choice question answering task for choosing the more likely explanation, and (ii) Abductive NLG: a conditional generation task for explaining given observations in natural language. On Abductive NLI, the best model achieves 68.9% accuracy, well below human performance of 91.4%. On Abductive NLG, the current best language generators struggle even more, as they lack reasoning capabilities that are trivial for humans. Our analysis leads to new insights into the types of reasoning that deep pre-trained language models fail to perform--despite their strong performance on the related but more narrowly defined task of entailment NLI--pointing to interesting avenues for future research.
UNcommonsense Reasoning: Abductive Reasoning about Uncommon Situations
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Commonsense reasoning is an appealing topic in natural language processing (NLP) as it plays a fundamental role in supporting the human-like actions of NLP systems. With large-scale language models as the backbone, unsupervised pre-training on numerous corpora shows the potential to capture commonsense knowledge. Current pre-trained language model (PLM)-based reasoning follows the traditional practice using perplexity metric. However, commonsense reasoning is more than existing probability evaluation, which is biased by word frequency. This paper reconsiders the nature of commonsense reasoning…
While commonsense knowledge acquisition and reasoning has traditionally been a core research topic in the knowledge representation and reasoning community, recent years have seen a surge of interest in the natural language processing community in developing pre-trained models and testing their ability to address a variety of newly designed commonsense knowledge reasoning and generation tasks. This paper presents a survey of these tasks, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of state-of-the-art pre-trained models for commonsense reasoning and generation as revealed by these tasks, and reflects…
We present DiscoSense, a benchmark for commonsense reasoning via understanding a wide variety of discourse connectives. We generate compelling distractors in DiscoSense using Conditional Adversarial Filtering, an extension of Adversarial Filtering that employs conditional generation. We show that state-of-the-art pre-trained language models struggle to perform well on DiscoSense, which makes this dataset ideal for evaluating next-generation commonsense reasoning systems.
Despite the success of generative pre-trained language models on a series of text generation tasks, they still suffer in cases where reasoning over underlying commonsense knowledge is required during generation. Existing approaches that integrate commonsense knowledge into generative pre-trained language models simply transfer relational knowledge by post-training on individual knowledge triples while ignoring rich connections within the knowledge graph. We argue that exploiting both the structural and semantic information of the knowledge graph facilitates commonsense-aware text generation. I…
Can we get existing language models and refine them for zero-shot commonsense reasoning? This paper presents an initial study exploring the feasibility of zero-shot commonsense reasoning for the Winograd Schema Challenge by formulating the task as self-supervised refinement of a pre-trained language model. In contrast to previous studies that rely on fine-tuning annotated datasets, we seek to boost conceptualization via loss landscape refinement. To this end, we propose a novel self-supervised learning approach that refines the language model utilizing a set of linguistic perturbations of simi…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Large-scale, pre-trained language models (LMs) have achieved human-level performance on a breadth of language understanding tasks. However, evaluations only based on end task performance shed little light on machines' true ability in language understanding and reasoning. In this paper, we highlight the importance of evaluating the underlying reasoning process in addition to end performance. Toward this goal, we introduce Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics (TRIP), a novel commonsense reasoning dataset with dense annotations that enable multi-tiered evaluation of machines' reasoning process.…
Previous studies have shown the efficacy of knowledge augmentation methods in pretrained language models. However, these methods behave differently across domains and downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate the augmentation of pretrained language models with commonsense knowledge in the cause-effect relation classification and commonsense causal reasoning tasks. After automatically verbalizing ATOMIC2020, a wide coverage commonsense reasoning knowledge graph, and GLUCOSE, a dataset of implicit commonsense causal knowledge, we continually pretrain BERT and RoBERTa with the verbalized dat…
SemEval-2026 Task 12: Abductive Event Reasoning: Towards Real-World Event Causal Inference for Large Language Models
The Key Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Intelligence for Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（认知与决策智能复杂系统重点实验室，自动化研究所，中国科学院，北京，中国）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（人工智能学院，中国科学院大学，北京，中国）
CAS Key Lab of Network Data Science and Technology, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所网络数据科学与技术重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
The abductive natural language inference task ($α$NLI) is proposed to evaluate the abductive reasoning ability of a learning system. In the $α$NLI task, two observations are given and the most plausible hypothesis is asked to pick out from the candidates. Existing methods simply formulate it as a classification problem, thus a cross-entropy log-loss objective is used during training. However, discriminating true from false does not measure the plausibility of a hypothesis, for all the hypotheses have a chance to happen, only the probabilities are different. To fill this gap, we switch to a ran…
Large, transformer-based pretrained language models like BERT, GPT, and T5 have demonstrated a deep understanding of contextual semantics and language syntax. Their success has enabled significant advances in conversational AI, including the development of open-dialogue systems capable of coherent, salient conversations which can answer questions, chat casually, and complete tasks. However, state-of-the-art models still struggle with tasks that involve higher levels of reasoning - including commonsense reasoning that humans find trivial. This paper presents a survey of recent conversational AI…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
This paper proposes a novel approach to learn commonsense from images, instead of limited raw texts or costly constructed knowledge bases, for the commonsense reasoning problem in NLP. Our motivation comes from the fact that an image is worth a thousand words, where richer scene information could be leveraged to help distill the commonsense knowledge, which is often hidden in languages. Our approach, namely Loire, consists of two stages. In the first stage, a bi-modal sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized to conduct the scene layout generation task, based on a text representation model ViB…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Facebook AI（脸书人工智能）
Many commonsense reasoning NLP tasks involve choosing between one or more possible answers to a question or prompt based on knowledge that is often implicit. Large pretrained language models (PLMs) can achieve near-human performance on such tasks, while providing little human-interpretable evidence of the underlying reasoning they use. In this work, we show how to use these same models to generate such evidence: inspired by the contrastive nature of human explanations, we use PLMs to complete explanation prompts which contrast alternatives according to the key attribute(s) required to justify …
Dialectical language model evaluation: An initial appraisal of the commonsense spatial reasoning abilities of LLMs
University of Leeds（利兹大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；ValGRAI；Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence（利弗休姆未来智能中心）
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；School of Information, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学信息学院）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京智源人工智能研究院）
Commonsense reasoning in natural language is a desired ability of artificial intelligent systems. For solving complex commonsense reasoning tasks, a typical solution is to enhance pre-trained language models~(PTMs) with a knowledge-aware graph neural network~(GNN) encoder that models a commonsense knowledge graph~(CSKG). Despite the effectiveness, these approaches are built on heavy architectures, and can't clearly explain how external knowledge resources improve the reasoning capacity of PTMs. Considering this issue, we conduct a deep empirical analysis, and find that it is indeed relation fe…
Abductive Reasoning is a task of inferring the most plausible hypothesis given a set of observations. In literature, the community has approached to solve this challenge by classifying/generating a likely hypothesis that does not contradict with a past observation and future observation. Some of the most well-known benchmarks that tackle this problem are aNLI and aNLG (pronounced as alpha-NLI and alpha-NLG). In this report, I review over some of the methodologies that were attempted to solve this challenge, re-implement the baseline models, and analyze some of the weaknesses that current appro…
Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；Research Training Group AIPHES（AIPHES研究培训小组）；Institute for Computational Linguistics（计算语言学研究所）
Social Commonsense Reasoning requires understanding of text, knowledge about social events and their pragmatic implications, as well as commonsense reasoning skills. In this work we propose a novel multi-head knowledge attention model that encodes semi-structured commonsense inference rules and learns to incorporate them in a transformer-based reasoning cell. We assess the model's performance on two tasks that require different reasoning skills: Abductive Natural Language Inference and Counterfactual Invariance Prediction as a new task. We show that our proposed model improves performance over…
Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Abductive and counterfactual reasoning, core abilities of everyday human cognition, require reasoning about what might have happened at time t, while conditioning on multiple contexts from the relative past and future. However, simultaneous incorporation of past and future contexts using generative language models (LMs) can be challenging, as they are trained either to condition only on the past context or to perform narrowly scoped text-infilling. In this paper, we propose DeLorean, a new unsupervised decoding algorithm that can flexibly incorporate both the past and future contexts using onl…
Generative commonsense reasoning is the capability of a language model to generate a sentence with a given concept-set that is based on commonsense knowledge. However, generative language models still struggle to provide outputs, and the training set does not contain patterns that are sufficient for generative commonsense reasoning. In this paper, we propose a data-centric method that uses automatic knowledge augmentation to extend commonsense knowledge using a machine knowledge generator. This method can generate semi-golden sentences that improve the generative commonsense reasoning of a lan…
We study the challenge of learning causal reasoning over procedural text to answer "What if..." questions when external commonsense knowledge is required. We propose a novel multi-hop graph reasoning model to 1) efficiently extract a commonsense subgraph with the most relevant information from a large knowledge graph; 2) predict the causal answer by reasoning over the representations obtained from the commonsense subgraph and the contextual interactions between the questions and context. We evaluate our model on WIQA benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to the recent mod…
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
It remains an open question whether incorporating external knowledge benefits commonsense reasoning while maintaining the flexibility of pretrained sequence models. To investigate this question, we develop generated knowledge prompting, which consists of generating knowledge from a language model, then providing the knowledge as additional input when answering a question. Our method does not require task-specific supervision for knowledge integration, or access to a structured knowledge base, yet it improves performance of large-scale, state-of-the-art models on four commonsense reasoning task…
Idiap Research Institute（伊迪亚普研究所）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
Most of the contemporary approaches for multi-hop Natural Language Inference (NLI) construct explanations considering each test case in isolation. However, this paradigm is known to suffer from semantic drift, a phenomenon that causes the construction of spurious explanations leading to wrong conclusions. In contrast, this paper proposes an abductive framework for multi-hop NLI exploring the retrieve-reuse-refine paradigm in Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). Specifically, we present Case-Based Abductive Natural Language Inference (CB-ANLI), a model that addresses unseen inference problems by analogi…
