Concept-Reversed Winograd Schema Challenge: Evaluating and Improving Robust Reasoning in Large Language Models via Abstraction

Kaiqiao Han, Tianqing Fang, Zhaowei Wang, Yangqiu Song, Mark Steedman


Abstract
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable proficiency in reasoning, there is still a concern about hallucinations and unreliable reasoning issues due to semantic associations and superficial logical chains. To evaluate the extent to which LLMs perform robust reasoning instead of relying on superficial logical chains, we propose a new evaluation dataset, the Concept-Reversed Winograd Schema Challenge (CR-WSC), based on the famous Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) dataset. By simply reversing the concepts to those that are more associated with the wrong answer, we find that the performance of LLMs drops significantly despite the rationale of reasoning remaining the same. Furthermore, we propose Abstraction-of-Thought (AoT), a novel prompt method for recovering adversarial cases to normal cases using conceptual abstraction to improve LLMs’ robustness and consistency in reasoning, as demonstrated by experiments on CR-WSC.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-short.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
229–243
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-short.20/
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Cite (ACL):
Kaiqiao Han, Tianqing Fang, Zhaowei Wang, Yangqiu Song, and Mark Steedman. 2025. Concept-Reversed Winograd Schema Challenge: Evaluating and Improving Robust Reasoning in Large Language Models via Abstraction. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 229–243, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Concept-Reversed Winograd Schema Challenge: Evaluating and Improving Robust Reasoning in Large Language Models via Abstraction (Han et al., NAACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-short.20.pdf