FRIDA to the Rescue! Analyzing Synthetic Data Effectiveness in Object-Based Common Sense Reasoning for Disaster Response

Mollie Shichman, Claire Bonial, Austin Blodgett, Taylor Pellegrin, Francis Ferraro, Rachel Rudinger


Abstract
During Human Robot Interactions in disaster relief scenarios, Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential for substantial physical reasoning to assist in mission objectives. However, these reasoning capabilities are often found only in larger models, which are not currently reasonable to deploy on robotic systems due to size constraints. To meet our problem space requirements, we introduce a dataset and pipeline to create Field Reasoning and Instruction Decoding Agent (FRIDA) models. In our pipeline, domain experts and linguists combine their knowledge to make high-quality, few-shot prompts used to generate synthetic data for fine-tuning. We hand-curate datasets for this few-shot prompting and for evaluation to improve LLM reasoning on both general and disaster-specific objects. We concurrently run an ablation study to understand which kinds of synthetic data most affect performance. We fine-tune several small instruction-tuned models and find that ablated FRIDA models only trained on objects’ physical state and function data outperformed both the FRIDA models trained on all synthetic data and the base models in our evaluation. We demonstrate that the FRIDA pipeline is capable of instilling physical common sense with minimal data.
Anthology ID:
2025.iwcs-main.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Düsseldorf, Germany
Editors:
Kilian Evang, Laura Kallmeyer, Sylvain Pogodalla
Venue:
IWCS
SIG:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16–29
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwcs-main.2/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mollie Shichman, Claire Bonial, Austin Blodgett, Taylor Pellegrin, Francis Ferraro, and Rachel Rudinger. 2025. FRIDA to the Rescue! Analyzing Synthetic Data Effectiveness in Object-Based Common Sense Reasoning for Disaster Response. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics, pages 16–29, Düsseldorf, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FRIDA to the Rescue! Analyzing Synthetic Data Effectiveness in Object-Based Common Sense Reasoning for Disaster Response (Shichman et al., IWCS 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.iwcs-main.2.pdf