Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 450 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

Commonsense reasoning is intuitive for humans but has been a long-term challenge for artificial intelligence (AI). Recent advancements in pretrained language models have shown promising results on several commonsense benchmark datasets. However, the reliability and comprehensiveness of these benchmarks towards assessing model's commonsense reasoning ability remains unclear. To this end, we introduce a new commonsense reasoning benchmark dataset comprising natural language true/false statements, with each sample paired with its complementary counterpart, resulting in 4k sentence pairs. We propose a pairwise accuracy metric to reliably measure an agent's ability to perform commonsense reasoning over a given situation. The dataset is crowdsourced and enhanced with an adversarial model-in-the-loop setup to incentivize challenging samples. To facilitate a systematic analysis of commonsense capabilities, we design our dataset along the dimensions of knowledge domains, reasoning scenarios and numeracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our strongest baseline (UnifiedQA-3B), after fine-tuning, achieves ~71% standard accuracy and ~51% pairwise accuracy, well below human performance (~95% for both metrics). The dataset is available at https://github.com/PlusLabNLP/Com2Sense.

We present EventPlus, a temporal event understanding pipeline that integrates various state-of-the-art event understanding components including event trigger and type detection, event argument detection, event duration and temporal relation extraction. Event information, especially event temporal knowledge, is a type of common sense knowledge that helps people understand how stories evolve and provides predictive hints for future events. EventPlus as the first comprehensive temporal event understanding pipeline provides a convenient tool for users to quickly obtain annotations about events and their temporal information for any user-provided document. Furthermore, we show EventPlus can be easily adapted to other domains (e.g., biomedical domain). We make EventPlus publicly available to facilitate event-related information extraction and downstream applications.