Papers with relational reasoning
Modularized Zero-shot VQA with Pre-trained Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on zero-shot visual question answering does not explicitly consider multi-step reasoning chains, making them less interpretable compared with a decomposition-based approach. |
| Approach: | They propose a modularized zero-shot network that explicitly decomposes questions into sub reasoning steps and is highly interpretable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decomposes questions into sub reasoning steps and is highly interpretable. |
How Do Large Language Models Perform in Dynamical System Modeling (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent data-driven methods often use graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn interactions between objects. |
| Approach: | They propose prompting techniques for dynamical system modeling and evaluate their performance . they find that large language models demonstrate competitive performance without training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show competitive performance without training compared to state-of-the-art methods in dynamical system modeling. |
Metric-guided Distillation: Distilling Knowledge from the Metric to Ranker and Retriever for Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xingwei He, Yeyun Gong, A-Long Jin, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Sm Yiu, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work on commonsense generation requires models to have relational reasoning and compositional generalization capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric distillation rule to distill knowledge from a standard metric to a ranker and transfer it to re-ranking a retriever. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA. |
Working Memory Networks: Augmenting Memory Networks with a Relational Reasoning Module (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep neural networks have enabled complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a MemNN architecture with a working memory storage and reasoning module that retains relational reasoning abilities of relation networks while reducing computational complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the relational reasoning abilities of the RN while reducing its computational complexity from quadratic to linear. |
Learning Reasoning Patterns for Relational Triple Extraction with Mutual Generation of Text and Graph (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focused on learning text patterns from explicit mentions but failed to extract the implicitly implied triples. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a relational graph from a sentence and apply multi-layer graph convolutions to capture the type inference logic of the paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can find multi-hop reasoning paths and capture type inference logic with the sentence's supplementary relational expressions. |
Reasoning with Latent Structure Refinement for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level relation extraction capture non-local interactions but are not able to capture rich non-linguistic interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that empowers relational reasoning across sentences by automatically inducing the latent document- level graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an F1 score of 59.05 on a large-scale document-level dataset (DocRED), significantly improving over the previous results. |
CommonGen: A Constrained Text Generation Challenge for Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models perform well on commonsense-reasoning benchmark datasets, but building machines with commonsence to compose plausible sentences remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a constrained text generation task for generative commonsense reasoning that generates a coherent sentence using common concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task generates a coherent sentence describing an everyday scenario using common concepts over 35k concept-sets. |
Graph-Based Knowledge Integration for Question Answering over Dialogue (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for question answering over dialogue did not consider dialogue structure and background knowledge (e.g., relationships between speakers). |
| Approach: | They propose a method which organizes a dialogue as a "relational graph" and uses edges to represent relationships between entities to encode multi-relations knowledge for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is better at tackling complex questions requiring relational reasoning and defending adversarial attacks with distracting sentences. |
ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
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Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Ryuichi Takanobu, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Heng Ji, Minlie Huang, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training objectives do not explicitly model relational facts in text . Experimental results show that ERICA can improve typical PLMs on several language understanding tasks, including relation extraction, entity typing and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework ERICA to obtain a deep understanding of entities and relations in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve PLMs on several language understanding tasks, especially under low-resource settings. |
NG-Router: Graph-Supervised Multi-Agent Collaboration for Nutrition Question Answering (2026.eacl-long)
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Kaiwen Shi, Zheyuan Zhang, Zhengqing Yuan, Keerthiram Murugesan, Vincent Galassi, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Existing methods for nutrition question answering face limited reasoning capacity and contextual overload . poor dietary patterns are associated with more than 11 million deaths in 2017 . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables supervised multi-agent collaboration for nutritional QA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms single-agent and ensemble baselines in multi-agency reasoning tasks. |
Learning to Reason Deductively: Math Word Problem Solving as Complex Relation Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve math word problems do not provide explanations for generated expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a deductive approach that presents explainable deductive reasoning steps to iteratively construct target expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing strong baselines on four benchmark datasets. |
Jointly Extracting Explicit and Implicit Relational Triples with Reasoning Pattern Enhanced Binary Pointer Network (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relational triple extraction ignore implicit triples that lack explicit expressions, leading to incomplete knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a binary pointer network to extract explicit and implicit relational triples from sentences and to retain the information of extracted triples in an external memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts overlapping triples relevant to each word sequentially and retains the information of extracted triples in an external memory. |
Joint Enhancement of Relational Reasoning for Long-Context LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | JERR is a graph-based reasoning framework for large language models . it enables LLMs to handle extended contexts with improved reliability and transparency . |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based reasoning framework that integrates synopsis extraction, graph construction, and relational reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on ROUGE and F1 metrics and achieves the highest scores on the LLM-Rater evaluation. |
Mapping natural language commands to web elements (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a dataset of over 50,000 natural language commands captures various phenomena, including functional references, relational reasoning, and visual reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that requires the user to choose the correct element on a web page . they use a dataset of over 50,000 natural language commands to map these to web pages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be viewed as a reference game based on a dataset of over 50,000 natural language commands . |
Distilling Structured Knowledge for Text-Based Relational Reasoning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-based relational reasoning models lack a symbolic representation of text . performance gap between NLP models and structured models remains . |
| Approach: | They first pre-train a GNN on a reasoning task using structured inputs and then incorporate its knowledge into an NLP model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two state-of-the-art NLP models on 13 different inductive reasoning datasets from the CLUTRR benchmark. |
Multi-choice Relational Reasoning for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | cloze-style reading comprehension is a task that requires much semantic understanding and reasoning using various clues from texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-choice relational reasoning model that emulates human reading comprehension by combining fusion representations of document, query and candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models significantly on four datasets. |
TRN-R1-Zero: Text-rich Network Reasoning via LLMs with Reinforcement Learning Only (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language model-based approaches often overlook graph context or depend on distillation from larger models, limiting generalisation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for zero-shot reasoning on text-rich networks . they use a Neighbour-aware Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework optimises base LLMs using a Neighbour-aware group relative policy optimisation objective based on a novel margin gain metric for the informativeness of neighbouring signals . |
LLM-Guided Semantic Relational Reasoning for Multimodal Intent Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding intents from multimodal signals exhibit limitations in their modality-level reliance, constraining relational reasoning over fine-grained semantics for complex intent understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that harnesses the expansive knowledge of large language models to establish semantic foundations that boost smaller models’ relational reasoning performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multimodal intent and dialogue act recognition tasks and shows consistent performance gains across diverse semantic understanding scenarios. |
Cell-Based Representation of Relational Binding in Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has found evidence that Large Language Models (LLMs) are able to track entities across discourse . however, the mechanism by which they bind entities, relations, and attributes remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-dimensional cell-based binding representation for relational binding . they also show that context-specific CBR representations are related by translation vectors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model encodes a low-dimensional cell-based binding representation (CBR) a translation vector in activation space enables cross-context transfer, the study shows . |