Investigating Self-Rationalizing Models for Commonsense Reasoning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rise of explainable natural language processing spurred a bulk of work on datasets augmented with human explanations, as well as technical approaches to leverage them. Notably, generative large language models offer new possibilities, as they can output a prediction as well as an explanation in natural language. This work investigates the capabilities of fine-tuned text-to-text transfer Transformer (T5) models for commonsense reasoning and explanation generation. Our experiments suggest that while self-rationalizing models achieve interesting results, a significant gap remains: classifiers consistently outperformed self-rationalizing models, and a substantial fraction of model-generated explanations are not valid. Furthermore, training with expressive free-text explanations substantially altered the inner representation of the model, suggesting that they supplied additional information and may bridge the knowledge gap. Our code is publicly available, and the experiments were run on open-access datasets, hence allowing full reproducibility.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it