Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning over Machine Imagination

Hyuntae Park, Yeachan Kim, Jun-Hyung Park, SangKeun Lee


Abstract
Recent approaches to zero-shot commonsense reasoning have enabled Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to learn a broad range of commonsense knowledge without being tailored to specific situations. However, they often suffer from human reporting bias inherent in textual commonsense knowledge, leading to discrepancies in understanding between PLMs and humans. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing an additional information channel to PLMs. We propose Imagine (Machine Imagination-based Reasoning), a novel zero-shot commonsense reasoning framework designed to complement textual inputs with visual signals derived from machine-generated images. To achieve this, we enhance PLMs with imagination capabilities by incorporating an image generator into the reasoning process. To guide PLMs in effectively leveraging machine imagination, we create a synthetic pre-training dataset that simulates visual question-answering. Our extensive experiments on diverse reasoning benchmarks and analysis show that Imagine outperforms existing methods by a large margin, highlighting the strength of machine imagination in mitigating reporting bias and enhancing generalization capabilities.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.669
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11451–11471
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.findings-emnlp.669/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.669
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hyuntae Park, Yeachan Kim, Jun-Hyung Park, and SangKeun Lee. 2024. Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning over Machine Imagination. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11451–11471, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning over Machine Imagination (Park et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.findings-emnlp.669.pdf