Benchmarks for Automated Commonsense Reasoning: A Survey
On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation
Abstract (arXiv)
More than one hundred benchmarks have been developed to test the commonsense knowledge and commonsense reasoning abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, these benchmarks are often flawed and many aspects of common sense remain untested. Consequently, we do not currently have any reliable way of measuring to what extent existing AI systems have achieved these abilities. This paper surveys the development and uses of AI commonsense benchmarks. We discuss the nature of common sense; the role of common sense in AI; the goals served by constructing commonsense benchmarks; and desirable features of commonsense benchmarks. We analyze the common flaws in benchmarks, and we argue that it is worthwhile to invest the work needed ensure that benchmark examples are consistently high quality. We survey the various methods of constructing commonsense benchmarks. We enumerate 139 commonsense benchmarks that have been developed: 102 text-based, 18 image-based, 12 video based, and 7 simulated physical environments. We discuss the gaps in the existing benchmarks and aspects of commonsense reasoning that are not addressed in any existing benchmark. We conclude with a number of recommendations for future development of commonsense AI benchmarks.
Key facts. Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 104 of its 194 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Feb 2023.
Builds on
104 of 194 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
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Other references · 100
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- 2019PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Languagecited by 2,818
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- 2018CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledgecited by 1,793
- 2017The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sensecited by 1,092
- 2016ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledgecited by 1,065
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- 2020Aligning AI With Shared Human Valuescited by 706
- 2018Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Datacited by 656
- 2018From Recognition to Cognition: Visual Commonsense Reasoningcited by 553
- 2016Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understandingcited by 535
- 2019CLEVRER: CoLlision Events for Video REpresentation and Reasoningcited by 475
- 2016A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Storiescited by 413
- 2018SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inferencecited by 333
- 2022ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?cited by 298
- 2019Cosmos QA: Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextual Commonsense Reasoningcited by 281
- 2020CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmarkcited by 277
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- 2019Action Genome: Actions as Composition of Spatio-temporal Scene Graphscited by 249
- 2015YFCC100M: The New Data in Multimedia Researchcited by 234
- 2018ReCoRD: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Commonsense Reading Comprehensioncited by 198
- 2019WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scalecited by 194
- 2016FVQA: Fact-based Visual Question Answeringcited by 181
- 2016Movie Descriptioncited by 180
- 2021Physion: Evaluating Physical Prediction from Vision in Humans and Machinescited by 145
- 2019PHYRE: A New Benchmark for Physical Reasoningcited by 137
- 2019CATER: A diagnostic dataset for Compositional Actions and TEmporal Reasoningcited by 137
- 2019"Going on a vacation" takes longer than "Going for a walk": A Study of Temporal Commonsense Understandingcited by 121
- 2021AGQA: A Benchmark for Compositional Spatio-Temporal Reasoningcited by 120
- 2020How Can We Accelerate Progress Towards Human-like Linguistic Generalization?cited by 114
- 2020Birds have four legs?! NumerSense: Probing Numerical Commonsense Knowledge of Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 110
- 2022CommonsenseQA 2.0: Exposing the Limits of AI through Gamificationcited by 108
- 2021Visual Room Rearrangementcited by 101
- 2021Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Researchcited by 100
- 2021CREAK: A Dataset for Commonsense Reasoning over Entity Knowledgecited by 88
- 2015Explicit Knowledge-based Reasoning for Visual Question Answeringcited by 85
- 2021e-ViL: A Dataset and Benchmark for Natural Language Explanations in Vision-Language Taskscited by 84
- 2019CoPhy: Counterfactual Learning of Physical Dynamicscited by 80
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- 2026Beyond Model Scaling: Test-Time Intervention for Efficient Deep Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Beyond Model Scaling: Test-Time Intervention for Efficient Deep Reasoning16 Jan 2026
- 2025Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts: A Culturally Grounded Physical Reasoning Benchmark22 Sep 2025
- 2025AgentCoMa: A Compositional Benchmark Mixing Commonsense and Mathematical Reasoning in Real-World Scenarios27 Aug 2025
- 2025mSCoRe: a Multilingual and Scalable Benchmark for Skill-based Commonsense Reasoning13 Aug 2025
- 2025Generalizable LLM Learning of Graph Synthetic Data with Post-training Alignment1 Jun 2025
- 2024ACCORD: Closing the Commonsense Measurability Gap4 Jun 2024
- 2024Benchmarking Chinese Commonsense Reasoning of LLMs: From Chinese-Specifics to Reasoning-Memorization Correlations21 Mar 2024
- 2023CRoW: Benchmarking Commonsense Reasoning in Real-World Tasks23 Oct 2023
- 2023An Overview Of Temporal Commonsense Reasoning and Acquisition28 Jul 2023
- 2023Dialectical language model evaluation: An initial appraisal of the commonsense spatial reasoning abilities of LLMs22 Apr 2023
- 2023CKBP v2: Better Annotation and Reasoning for Commonsense Knowledge Base Population20 Apr 2023
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- 2025Deprecating Benchmarks: Criteria and Framework8 Jul 2025
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- 2024DEFAME: Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts13 Dec 2024
- 2024Aligning Generalisation Between Humans and Machines23 Nov 2024
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