From Heuristic to Analytic: Cognitively Motivated Strategies for Coherent Physical Commonsense Reasoning

Zheyuan Zhang, Shane Storks, Fengyuan Hu, Sungryull Sohn, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee, Joyce Chai


Abstract
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance in various language tasks. However, they are prone to spurious correlations, and often generate illusory information. In real-world applications, PLMs should justify decisions with formalized, coherent reasoning chains, but this challenge remains under-explored. Cognitive psychology theorizes that humans are capable of utilizing fast and intuitive *heuristic* thinking to make decisions based on past experience, then rationalizing the decisions through slower and deliberative *analytic* reasoning. We incorporate these interlinked dual processes in fine-tuning and in-context learning with PLMs, applying them to two language understanding tasks that require coherent physical commonsense reasoning. We show that our proposed Heuristic-Analytic Reasoning (HAR) strategies drastically improve the coherence of rationalizations for model decisions, yielding state-of-the-art results on Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics (TRIP). We also find that this improved coherence is a direct result of more faithful attention to relevant language context in each step of reasoning. Our findings suggest that human-like reasoning strategies can effectively improve the coherence and reliability of PLM reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.456
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7354–7379
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.456
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.456
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zheyuan Zhang, Shane Storks, Fengyuan Hu, Sungryull Sohn, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee, and Joyce Chai. 2023. From Heuristic to Analytic: Cognitively Motivated Strategies for Coherent Physical Commonsense Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7354–7379, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Heuristic to Analytic: Cognitively Motivated Strategies for Coherent Physical Commonsense Reasoning (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.456.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.456.mp4