# AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08207/) (2021)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [Adversarial NLI: A New Benchmark for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.14599/) (2019)
- [The RefinedWeb Dataset for Falcon LLM: Outperforming Curated Corpora with Web Data, and Web Data Only](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01116/) (2023)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [Texygen: A Benchmarking Platform for Text Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01886/) (2018)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [Large Language Model Guided Tree-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08291/) (2023)
- [Head-to-Tail: How Knowledgeable are Large Language Models (LLMs)? A.K.A. Will LLMs Replace Knowledge Graphs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10168/) (2023)
- [Explaining Answers with Entailment Trees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08661/) (2021)
- [ASER: A Large-scale Eventuality Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00270/) (2019)
- [GlossBERT: BERT for Word Sense Disambiguation with Gloss Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07245/) (2019)
- [PropSegmEnt: A Large-Scale Corpus for Proposition-Level Segmentation and Entailment Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10750/) (2022)
- [ASER: Towards Large-scale Commonsense Knowledge Acquisition via Higher-order Selectional Preference over Eventualities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02137/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models: In-Depth Analysis on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11793/) (2024)
- [CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07286/) (2024)
- [MM-Soc: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models in Social Media Platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14154/) (2024)
- [AutoSchemaKG: Autonomous Knowledge Graph Construction through Dynamic Schema Induction from Web-Scale Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23628/) (2025)
- [Editing Conceptual Knowledge for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06259/) (2024)
- [CLLMate: A Multimodal Benchmark for Weather and Climate Events Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19058/) (2024)
- [AbsInstruct: Eliciting Abstraction Ability from LLMs through Explanation Tuning with Plausibility Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10646/) (2024)
- [MARS: Benchmarking the Metaphysical Reasoning Abilities of Language Models with a Multi-task Evaluation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02106/) (2024)
- [Abstraction-of-Thought Makes Language Models Better Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12442/) (2024)
- [ComparisonQA: Evaluating Factuality Robustness of LLMs Through Knowledge Frequency Control and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20251/) (2024)
- [Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for User Intention Relation Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11500/) (2024)
- [Concept-Reversed Winograd Schema Challenge: Evaluating and Improving Robust Reasoning in Large Language Models via Abstraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12040/) (2024)
- [On the Role of Entity and Event Level Conceptualization in Generalizable Reasoning: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10885/) (2024)
- [KNOWCOMP POKEMON Team at DialAM-2024: A Two-Stage Pipeline for Detecting Relations in Dialogical Argument Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19740/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Query Optimization in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17558/) (2024)
- [Generalization through Lexical Abstraction in Transformer Models: The Case of Functional Words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19887/) (2026)
- [Semantic Abstraction for Natural Language Inference: a Methodological Framework for Discovering and Compensating Semantic Knowledge and Reasoning Gaps in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26610/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cognitive research indicates that abstraction ability is essential in human intelligence, which remains under-explored in language models. In this paper, we present AbsPyramid, a unified entailment graph of 221K textual descriptions of abstraction knowledge. While existing resources only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains, AbsPyramid collects abstract knowledge for three components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models in the open domain. Experimental results demonstrate that current LLMs face challenges comprehending abstraction knowledge in zero-shot and few-shot settings. By training on our rich abstraction knowledge, we find LLMs can acquire basic abstraction abilities and generalize to unseen events. In the meantime, we empirically show that our benchmark is comprehensive to enhance LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks.