# Modularized Transfer Learning with Multiple Knowledge Graphs for Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 36 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2022.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08114/) (2017)
- [AdapterFusion: Non-Destructive Task Composition for Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00247/) (2020)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [MAD-X: An Adapter-Based Framework for Multi-Task Cross-Lingual Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00052/) (2020)
- [AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07779/) (2020)
- [Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11504/) (2019)
- [SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05326/) (2018)
- [K-Adapter: Infusing Knowledge into Pre-Trained Models with Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01808/) (2020)
- [Abductive Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05739/) (2019)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [Simple, Scalable Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08478/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering with Self-Talk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05483/) (2020)
- [Understanding and Improving Information Transfer in Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00944/) (2020)
- [UNICORN on RAINBOW: A Universal Commonsense Reasoning Model on a New Multitask Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13009/) (2021)
- [Commonsense Knowledge Base Completion with Structural and Semantic Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02915/) (2019)
- [Conditionally Adaptive Multi-Task Learning: Improving Transfer Learning in NLP Using Fewer Parameters & Less Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09139/) (2020)
- [Scalable Transfer Learning with Expert Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13239/) (2020)
- [The Adapter-Bot: All-In-One Controllable Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12579/) (2020)
- [Towards Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Systems for Commonsense Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14087/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Knowledge Triplet Learning for Zero-shot Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00316/) (2020)
- [Dimensions of Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04640/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [FactKB: Generalizable Factuality Evaluation using Language Models Enhanced with Factual Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08281/) (2023)
- [Mind the Gap! Injecting Commonsense Knowledge for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00930/) (2022)
- [KALM: Knowledge-Aware Integration of Local, Document, and Global Contexts for Long Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04105/) (2022)
- [Multi-hop Commonsense Knowledge Injection Framework for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05936/) (2023)
- [An Initial Exploration of Fine-tuning Small Language Models for Smart Contract Reentrancy Vulnerability Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19059/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Commonsense reasoning systems should be able to generalize to diverse reasoning cases. However, most state-of-the-art approaches depend on expensive data annotations and overfit to a specific benchmark without learning how to perform general semantic reasoning. To overcome these drawbacks, zero-shot QA systems have shown promise as a robust learning scheme by transforming a commonsense knowledge graph (KG) into synthetic QA-form samples for model training. Considering the increasing type of different commonsense KGs, this paper aims to extend the zero-shot transfer learning scenario into multiple-source settings, where different KGs can be utilized synergetically. Towards this goal, we propose to mitigate the loss of knowledge from the interference among the different knowledge sources, by developing a modular variant of the knowledge aggregation as a new zero-shot commonsense reasoning framework. Results on five commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our framework, improving the performance with multiple KGs.
