Introducing Verification Task of Set Consistency with Set-Consistency Energy Networks

Mooho Song, Hye Ryung Son, Jay-Yoon Lee


Abstract
Examining logical inconsistencies among multiple statements (such as collections of sentences or question-answer pairs) is a crucial challenge in machine learning, particularly for ensuring the safety and reliability of models. Traditional methods that rely on 1:1 pairwise comparisons often fail to capture inconsistencies that only emerge when more than two statements are evaluated collectively. To address this gap, we introduce the task of set-consistency verification, an extension of natural language inference (NLI) that assesses the logical coherence of entire sets rather than isolated pairs. Building on this task, we present the Set-Consistency Energy Network (SC-Energy), a novel model that employs a margin-based loss to learn the compatibility among a collection of statements. Our approach not only efficiently verifies inconsistencies and pinpoints the specific statements responsible for logical contradictions, but also significantly outperforms existing methods, including prompting-based LLM models. Furthermore, we release two new datasets: Set-LConVQA and Set-SNLI for set-consistency verification task.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1599
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33346–33366
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1599/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mooho Song, Hye Ryung Son, and Jay-Yoon Lee. 2025. Introducing Verification Task of Set Consistency with Set-Consistency Energy Networks. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 33346–33366, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Introducing Verification Task of Set Consistency with Set-Consistency Energy Networks (Song et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1599.pdf