# Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning with Unrestricted Answer Scope

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11672/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Knowledge- and tool-augmented reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/knowledge-and-tool-augmented-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00700/) (2020)
- [QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06378/) (2021)
- [QASC: A Dataset for Question Answering via Sentence Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11473/) (2019)
- [KagNet: Knowledge-Aware Graph Networks for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02151/) (2019)
- [Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08387/) (2021)
- [GreaseLM: Graph REASoning Enhanced Language Models for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08860/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering with Self-Talk](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05483/) (2020)
- [Domain Specialization as the Key to Make Large Language Models Disruptive: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18703/) (2023)
- [Text-to-Text Pre-Training for Data-to-Text Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10433/) (2020)
- [Prompting Contrastive Explanations for Commonsense Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06823/) (2021)
- [Differentiable Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14439/) (2020)
- [Incorporating Commonsense Knowledge Graph in Pretrained Models for Social Commonsense Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05457/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Knowledge-Enhanced Commonsense Question Answering via Knowledge-to-Text Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00760/) (2021)
- [Balancing Specialized and General Skills in LLMs: The Impact of Modern Tuning and Data Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04945/) (2023)
- [Distilling Relation Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15705/) (2021)
- [HiPrompt: Few-Shot Biomedical Knowledge Fusion via Hierarchy-Oriented Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05973/) (2023)
- [Generating Commonsense Explanation by Extracting Bridge Concepts from Reasoning Paths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11753/) (2020)
- [Deep Generation of Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12336/) (2022)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Neural Machine Reasoning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02093/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning is defined as solving a commonsense question without providing 1) a short list of answer candidates and 2) a pre-defined answer scope. Conventional ways of formulating the commonsense question into a question-answering form or utilizing external knowledge to learn retrieval-based methods are less applicable in the open-ended setting due to an inherent challenge. Without pre-defining an answer scope or a few candidates, open-ended commonsense reasoning entails predicting answers by searching over an extremely large searching space. Moreover, most questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning, which presents even more challenges to our problem. In this work, we leverage pre-trained language models to iteratively retrieve reasoning paths on the external knowledge base, which does not require task-specific supervision. The reasoning paths can help to identify the most precise answer to the commonsense question. We conduct experiments on two commonsense benchmark datasets. Compared to other approaches, our proposed method achieves better performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.