Papers › WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale

WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at Scale

24 Jul 2019arXiv:1907.10641archive 2025-07-28

Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) (Levesque, Davis, and Morgenstern 2011), a benchmark for commonsense reasoning, is a set of 273 expert-crafted pronoun resolution problems originally designed to be unsolvable for statistical models that rely on selectional preferences or word associations. However, recent advances in neural language models have already reached around 90% accuracy on variants of WSC. This raises an important question whether these models have truly acquired robust commonsense capabilities or whether they rely on spurious biases in the datasets that lead to an overestimation of the true capabilities of machine commonsense. To investigate this question, we introduce WinoGrande, a large-scale dataset of 44k problems, inspired by the original WSC design, but adjusted to improve both the scale and the hardness of the dataset. The key steps of the dataset construction consist of (1) a carefully designed crowdsourcing procedure, followed by (2) systematic bias reduction using a novel AfLite algorithm that generalizes human-detectable word associations to machine-detectable embedding associations. The best state-of-the-art methods on WinoGrande achieve 59.4-79.1%, which are 15-35% below human performance of 94.0%, depending on the amount of the training data allowed. Furthermore, we establish new state-of-the-art results on five related benchmarks - WSC (90.1%), DPR (93.1%), COPA (90.6%), KnowRef (85.6%), and Winogender (97.1%). These results have dual implications: on one hand, they demonstrate the effectiveness of WinoGrande when used as a resource for transfer learning. On the other hand, they raise a concern that we are likely to be overestimating the true capabilities of machine commonsense across all these benchmarks. We emphasize the importance of algorithmic bias reduction in existing and future benchmarks to mitigate such overestimation.

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swarnahub/explanationhardness mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
vered1986/self_talk mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
pwc-1/Paper-9 mindspore report
pwc-1/Paper-9 mindspore report

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Tasks

Common Sense ReasoningCoreference ResolutionQuestion AnsweringTransfer LearningWinogrande

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

WinoGrande

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Common Sense Reasoning WinoGrande RoBERTa-Winogrande 355M (fine-tuned) Accuracy 79.1 #18 of 77 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning WinoGrande BERT-Winogrande 345M (fine-tuned) Accuracy 64.9 #45 of 77 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning WinoGrande RoBERTa-DPR 355M (0-shot) Accuracy 58.9 #53 of 77 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning WinoGrande BERT-large 345M (0-shot) Accuracy 51.9 #71 of 77 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning WinoGrande BERT-DPR 345M (0-shot) Accuracy 51 #75 of 77 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning WinoGrande RoBERTa-large 355M (0-shot) Accuracy 50 #77 of 77 Archive leaderboard report
Coreference Resolution Winograd Schema Challenge RoBERTa-WinoGrande 355M Accuracy 90.1 #9 of 82 Archive leaderboard report
Coreference Resolution Winograd Schema Challenge RoBERTa-DPR 355M Accuracy 83.1 #19 of 82 Archive leaderboard report
Coreference Resolution Winograd Schema Challenge WKH Accuracy 57.1 #67 of 82 Archive leaderboard report
Coreference Resolution Winograd Schema Challenge KEE+NKAM on WinoGrande Accuracy 52.8 #75 of 82 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering COPA RoBERTa-Winogrande-ft 355M (fine-tuned) Accuracy 90.6 #17 of 60 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering COPA RoBERTa-ft 355M (fine-tuned) Accuracy 86.4 #24 of 60 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering COPA RoBERTa-Winogrande 355M (fine-tuned) Accuracy 84.4 #30 of 60 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering COPA Causal Strength w/multi-word predicates (presumably on WinoGrande?) Accuracy 76.4 #43 of 60 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering COPA Pointwise Mutual Information (on 10M stories) Accuracy 65.4 #53 of 60 Archive leaderboard report

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