Transferring Procedural Knowledge across Commonsense Tasks

Stories about everyday situations are an essential part of human communication, motivating the need to develop AI agents that can reliably understand these stories. Despite the long list of supervised methods for story completion and procedural understanding, current AI has no mechanisms to automatically track and explain procedures in unseen stories. To bridge this gap, we study the ability of AI models to transfer procedural knowledge to novel narrative tasks in a transparent manner. We design LEAP: a comprehensive framework that integrates state-of-the-art modeling architectures, training regimes, and augmentation strategies based on both natural and synthetic stories. To address the lack of densely annotated training data, we devise a robust automatic labeler based on few-shot prompting to enhance the augmented data. Our experiments with in- and out-of-domain tasks reveal insights into the interplay of different architectures, training regimes, and augmentation strategies. LEAP's labeler has a clear positive impact on out-of-domain datasets, while the resulting dense annotation provides native explainability

BRAINTEASER: Lateral Thinking Puzzles for Large Language Models

The success of language models has inspired the NLP community to attend to tasks that require implicit and complex reasoning, relying on human-like commonsense mechanisms. While such vertical thinking tasks have been relatively popular, lateral thinking puzzles have received little attention. To bridge this gap, we devise BRAINTEASER: a multiple-choice Question Answering task designed to test the model's ability to exhibit lateral thinking and defy default commonsense associations. We design a three-step procedure for creating the first lateral thinking benchmark, consisting of data collection, distractor generation, and generation of adversarial examples, leading to 1,100 puzzles with high-quality annotations. To assess the consistency of lateral reasoning by models, we enrich BRAINTEASER based on a semantic and contextual reconstruction of its questions. Our experiments with state-of-the-art instruction- and commonsense language models reveal a significant gap between human and model performance, which is further widened when consistency across adversarial formats is considered. We make all of our code and data available to stimulate work on developing and evaluating lateral thinking models

Knowledge-enhanced Agents for Interactive Text Games

Communication via natural language is a key aspect of machine intelligence, and it requires computational models to learn and reason about world concepts, with varying levels of supervision. Significant progress has been made on fully-supervised non-interactive tasks, such as question-answering and procedural text understanding. Yet, various sequential interactive tasks, as in text-based games, have revealed limitations of existing approaches in terms of coherence, contextual awareness, and their ability to learn effectively from the environment. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-injection framework for improved functional grounding of agents in text-based games. Specifically, we consider two forms of domain knowledge that we inject into learning-based agents: memory of previous correct actions and affordances of relevant objects in the environment. Our framework supports two representative model classes: reinforcement learning agents and language model agents. Furthermore, we devise multiple injection strategies for the above domain knowledge types and agent architectures, including injection via knowledge graphs and augmentation of the existing input encoding strategies. We experiment with four models on the 10 tasks in the ScienceWorld text-based game environment, to illustrate the impact of knowledge injection on various model configurations and challenging task settings. Our findings provide crucial insights into the interplay between task properties, model architectures, and domain knowledge for interactive contexts.Comment: Published at K-CAP '2

Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) represent a substantial advancement in the capabilities of large language models, notably in reducing factual hallucination by leveraging external knowledge sources. However, the reliability of the retrieved information is not always guaranteed. The retrieval of irrelevant data can lead to misguided responses, and potentially causing the model to overlook its inherent knowledge, even when it possesses adequate information to address the query. Moreover, standard RALMs often struggle to assess whether they possess adequate knowledge, both intrinsic and retrieved, to provide an accurate answer. In situations where knowledge is lacking, these systems should ideally respond with "unknown" when the answer is unattainable. In response to these challenges, we introduces Chain-of-Noting (CoN), a novel approach aimed at improving the robustness of RALMs in facing noisy, irrelevant documents and in handling unknown scenarios. The core idea of CoN is to generate sequential reading notes for retrieved documents, enabling a thorough evaluation of their relevance to the given question and integrating this information to formulate the final answer. We employed ChatGPT to create training data for CoN, which was subsequently trained on an LLaMa-2 7B model. Our experiments across four open-domain QA benchmarks show that RALMs equipped with CoN significantly outperform standard RALMs. Notably, CoN achieves an average improvement of +7.9 in EM score given entirely noisy retrieved documents and +10.5 in rejection rates for real-time questions that fall outside the pre-training knowledge scope.Comment: Preprin

Knowledge-driven Data Construction for Zero-shot Evaluation in Commonsense Question Answering

Recent developments in pre-trained neural language modeling have led to leaps in accuracy on commonsense question-answering benchmarks. However, there is increasing concern that models overfit to specific tasks, without learning to utilize external knowledge or perform general semantic reasoning. In contrast, zero-shot evaluations have shown promise as a more robust measure of a model's general reasoning abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework for zero-shot question answering across commonsense tasks. Guided by a set of hypotheses, the framework studies how to transform various pre-existing knowledge resources into a form that is most effective for pre-training models. We vary the set of language models, training regimes, knowledge sources, and data generation strategies, and measure their impact across tasks. Extending on prior work, we devise and compare four constrained distractor-sampling strategies. We provide empirical results across five commonsense question-answering tasks with data generated from five external knowledge resources. We show that, while an individual knowledge graph is better suited for specific tasks, a global knowledge graph brings consistent gains across different tasks. In addition, both preserving the structure of the task as well as generating fair and informative questions help language models learn more effectively.Comment: AAAI 202

LASER: LLM Agent with State-Space Exploration for Web Navigation

Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully adapted for interactive decision-making tasks like web navigation. While achieving decent performance, previous methods implicitly assume a forward-only execution mode for the model, where they only provide oracle trajectories as in-context examples to guide the model on how to reason in the environment. Consequently, the model could not handle more challenging scenarios not covered in the in-context examples, e.g., mistakes, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose to model the interactive task as state space exploration, where the LLM agent transitions among a pre-defined set of states by performing actions to complete the task. This formulation enables flexible backtracking, allowing the model to recover from errors easily. We evaluate our proposed LLM Agent with State-Space ExploRation (LASER) on both the WebShop task and amazon.com. Experimental results show that LASER significantly outperforms previous methods and closes the gap with human performance on the web navigation task.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure