Relevant or Random: Can LLMs Truly Perform Analogical Reasoning?

Analogical reasoning is a unique ability of humans to address unfamiliar challenges by transferring strategies from relevant past experiences. One key finding in psychology is that compared with irrelevant past experiences, recalling relevant ones can help humans better handle new tasks. Coincidentally, the NLP community has also recently found that self-generating relevant examples in the context can help large language models (LLMs) better solve a given problem than hand-crafted prompts. However, it is yet not clear whether relevance is the key factor eliciting such capability, i.e., can LLMs benefit more from self-generated relevant examples than irrelevant ones? In this work, we systematically explore whether LLMs can truly perform analogical reasoning on a diverse set of reasoning tasks. With extensive experiments and analysis, we show that self-generated random examples can surprisingly achieve comparable or even better performance, e.g., 4% performance boost on GSM8K with random biological examples. We find that the accuracy of self-generated examples is the key factor and subsequently design two improved methods with significantly reduced inference costs. Overall, we aim to advance a deeper understanding of LLM analogical reasoning and hope this work stimulates further research in the design of self-generated contexts.

Lifelong Event Detection with Embedding Space Separation and Compaction

To mitigate forgetting, existing lifelong event detection methods typically maintain a memory module and replay the stored memory data during the learning of a new task. However, the simple combination of memory data and new-task samples can still result in substantial forgetting of previously acquired knowledge, which may occur due to the potential overlap between the feature distribution of new data and the previously learned embedding space. Moreover, the model suffers from overfitting on the few memory samples rather than effectively remembering learned patterns. To address the challenges of forgetting and overfitting, we propose a novel method based on embedding space separation and compaction. Our method alleviates forgetting of previously learned tasks by forcing the feature distribution of new data away from the previous embedding space. It also mitigates overfitting by a memory calibration mechanism that encourages memory data to be close to its prototype to enhance intra-class compactness. In addition, the learnable parameters of the new task are initialized by drawing upon acquired knowledge from the previously learned task to facilitate forward knowledge transfer. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches.

CausalChaos! Dataset for Comprehensive Causal Action Question Answering Over Longer Causal Chains Grounded in Dynamic Visual Scenes

Causal video question answering (QA) has garnered increasing interest, yet existing datasets often lack depth in causal reasoning analysis. To address this gap, we capitalize on the unique properties of cartoons and construct CausalChaos!, a novel, challenging causal Why-QA dataset built upon the iconic "Tom and Jerry" cartoon series. With thoughtful questions and multi-level answers, our dataset contains much longer causal chains embedded in dynamic interactions and visuals, at the same time principles of animation allows animators to create well-defined, unambiguous causal relationships. These factors allow models to solve more challenging, yet well-defined causal relationships. We also introduce hard negative mining, including CausalConfusion version. While models perform well, there is much room for improvement, especially, on open-ended answers. We identify more advanced/explicit causal relationship modeling and joint modeling of vision and language as the immediate areas for future efforts to focus upon. Along with the other complementary datasets, our new challenging dataset will pave the way for these developments in the field. We will release our dataset, codes, and models to help future efforts in this domain.