mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Do language models have coherent mental models of everyday things?

arXiv 2212.10029 ↗First posted 20 Dec 2022cs.CL cs.AIcited by 13

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Abstract (arXiv)

When people think of everyday things like an egg, they typically have a mental image associated with it. This allows them to correctly judge, for example, that "the yolk surrounds the shell" is a false statement. Do language models similarly have a coherent picture of such everyday things? To investigate this, we propose a benchmark dataset consisting of 100 everyday things, their parts, and the relationships between these parts, expressed as 11,720 "X relation Y?" true/false questions. Using these questions as probes, we observe that state-of-the-art pre-trained language models (LMs) like GPT-3 and Macaw have fragments of knowledge about these everyday things, but do not have fully coherent "parts mental models" (54-59% accurate, 19-43% conditional constraint violation). We propose an extension where we add a constraint satisfaction layer on top of the LM's raw predictions to apply commonsense constraints. As well as removing inconsistencies, we find that this also significantly improves accuracy (by 16-20%), suggesting how the incoherence of the LM's pictures of everyday things can be significantly reduced.

Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 17 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

Builds on

17 of 39 references.

References · 17

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  2. 2019PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Languagecited by 2,883
  3. 2018CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledgecited by 1,822
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  10. 2022Abstract Visual Reasoning with Tangram Shapescited by 43
  11. 2021General-Purpose Question-Answering with Macawcited by 40
  12. 2021PTR: A Benchmark for Part-based Conceptual, Relational, and Physical Reasoningcited by 34
5 more
  1. 2019HAKE: Human Activity Knowledge Enginecited by 32
  2. 2021DREAM: Improving Situational QA by First Elaborating the Situationcited by 18
  3. 2022Unpacking Large Language Models with Conceptual Consistencycited by 18
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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 4; 2024: 6; 2025: 2; 2026: 1.

13 papers.

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