# CommonsenseQA 2.0: Exposing the Limits of AI through Gamification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.05320 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05320/

## Key facts

- Cited by 109 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehend](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03340/) (2015)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [Adversarial NLI: A New Benchmark for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14599/) (2019)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07328/) (2017)
- [Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14337/) (2021)
- [Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12434/) (2019)
- [Dataset Cartography: Mapping and Diagnosing Datasets with Training Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10795/) (2020)
- [The Web as a Knowledge-base for Answering Complex Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06643/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Examples: Attacks and Defenses for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07107/) (2017)
- [SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05326/) (2018)
- [Adversarially Robust Generalization Requires More Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11285/) (2018)
- [WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10641/) (2019)
- [MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09753/) (2019)
- [MultiModalQA: Complex Question Answering over Text, Tables and Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06039/) (2021)
- [oLMpics -- On what Language Model Pre-training Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13283/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Filters of Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04108/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study on Robustness to Spurious Correlations using Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06778/) (2020)
- [Beat the AI: Investigating Adversarial Human Annotation for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00293/) (2020)
- [Quoref: A Reading Comprehension Dataset with Questions Requiring Coreferential Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05803/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 109)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03111/) (2023)
- [Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04093/) (2024)
- [UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05131/) (2022)
- [WANLI: Worker and AI Collaboration for Natural Language Inference Dataset Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05955/) (2022)
- [FLASK: Fine-grained Language Model Evaluation based on Alignment Skill Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10928/) (2023)
- [Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15402/) (2023)
- [Maieutic Prompting: Logically Consistent Reasoning with Recursive Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11822/) (2022)
- [Causal Parrots: Large Language Models May Talk Causality But Are Not Causal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13067/) (2023)
- [Are Sparse Autoencoders Useful? A Case Study in Sparse Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16681/) (2025)
- [LLM as a Mastermind: A Survey of Strategic Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01230/) (2024)
- [Can ChatGPT Defend its Belief in Truth? Evaluating LLM Reasoning via Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13160/) (2023)
- [Mind's Eye: Grounded Language Model Reasoning through Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05359/) (2022)
- [How to Catch an AI Liar: Lie Detection in Black-Box LLMs by Asking Unrelated Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15840/) (2023)
- [Breaking Common Sense: WHOOPS! A Vision-and-Language Benchmark of Synthetic and Compositional Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07274/) (2023)
- [Natural Language Reasoning, A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14725/) (2023)
- [Which of These Best Describes Multiple Choice Evaluation with LLMs? A) Forced B) Flawed C) Fixable D) All of the Above](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14127/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Prompt Engineering Methods in Large Language Models for Different NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12994/) (2024)
- [Vera: A General-Purpose Plausibility Estimation Model for Commonsense Statements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03695/) (2023)
- [Benchmarks for Automated Commonsense Reasoning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04752/) (2023)
- [Are Machine Rationales (Not) Useful to Humans? Measuring and Improving Human Utility of Free-Text Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07095/) (2023)
- [A Rosetta Stone for AI Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00193/) (2025)
- [Trends in Integration of Knowledge and Large Language Models: A Survey and Taxonomy of Methods, Benchmarks, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05876/) (2023)
- [Can LLMs Reason with Rules? Logic Scaffolding for Stress-Testing and Improving LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11442/) (2024)
- [CulturalTeaming: AI-Assisted Interactive Red-Teaming for Challenging LLMs' (Lack of) Multicultural Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06664/) (2024)
- [Second Thoughts are Best: Learning to Re-Align With Human Values from Text Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00355/) (2023)
- [CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04808/) (2023)
- [K-Level Reasoning: Establishing Higher Order Beliefs in Large Language Models for Strategic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01521/) (2024)
- [WinoGAViL: Gamified Association Benchmark to Challenge Vision-and-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12576/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Skills: A Configurable Model for Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03130/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Constructing benchmarks that test the abilities of modern natural language understanding models is difficult - pre-trained language models exploit artifacts in benchmarks to achieve human parity, but still fail on adversarial examples and make errors that demonstrate a lack of common sense. In this work, we propose gamification as a framework for data construction. The goal of players in the game is to compose questions that mislead a rival AI while using specific phrases for extra points. The game environment leads to enhanced user engagement and simultaneously gives the game designer control over the collected data, allowing us to collect high-quality data at scale. Using our method we create CommonsenseQA 2.0, which includes 14,343 yes/no questions, and demonstrate its difficulty for models that are orders-of-magnitude larger than the AI used in the game itself. Our best baseline, the T5-based Unicorn with 11B parameters achieves an accuracy of 70.2%, substantially higher than GPT-3 (52.9%) in a few-shot inference setup. Both score well below human performance which is at 94.1%.
