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

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. Story A: 1. Air is brought in through the mouth. 2. Passes through the lungs. 3. And into the bronchial tissue. 4. The carbon dioxide is removed. 5. The lungs bring the oxygen to the rest of the body. Story B: 1. Carbon dioxide enters the leaves through the stomates by diffusion. 2. Water is transported to the leaves in the xylem. 3. Energy harvested through light reaction is stored by forming ATP. 4. Carbon dioxide and energy from ATP are used to create sugar. 5. Oxygen exits the leaves through the stomata by diffusion. … Story A: 1. Mary went to the fridge. 2. Mary took out a bowl from the fridge. 3. The bowl had a cucumber and a donut in it. 4. Mary put the cucumber on the counter. 5. Mary ate the donut. Story B: 1. Mary went to the fridge. 2. Mary took out a bowl from the fridge. 3. The bowl had a cucumber and a donut in it. 4. Mary tossed the donut in the trash. 5. Mary ate the donut. Plausible story: A Conflicting sentences: (4, 5) States: inedible(donut) → edible(donut) Carbon dioxide conversion story: B Carbon dioxide conversion sentence: 4 Carbon dioxide conversion entity: sugarStory A: 41.0% 1. Coal is heated in the boiler. 2. The water tank over the boiler is heated. 3. Creates steam. 4. The steam is funneled to the piston. 5. Piston uses the steam as energy. 6. The piston causes the crankshaft to move. Story B: 59.0% 1. Plates on the Earth's crust move slowly past each other. 2. As the plates move, they exert a great force. 3. When the force is large enough, the crust breaks. 4. The stress is released as energy. 5. The energy moves through the Earth in the form of waves. 6. We feel the earthquake. What happened to energy? Story A: 16.3% 1. Coal is heated in the boiler. 2. The water tank over the boiler is heated. 3. Creates steam. 4. The steam is funne...