Benchmark Almanac

CommonSenseQA

PaLM 2-L 90.4% leads since May 2023
Dropped

Models answer five-way multiple-choice questions built from ConceptNet relations that need everyday background knowledge. Scored by accuracy.

Test labels are hidden, so model cards usually report the dev set.

Released
November 2018
Kind
Commonsense
Level
Everyday
Scored
Checked automatically
Answers
Multiple choice
Tasks
Public, plus a private test set
Strongest model tested
Llama 3.1-405B #162 on the capability index
Last in a launch post
April 2025, dropped after it saturated
Last model added
October 2026

In the authors’ words

When answering a question, people often draw upon their rich world knowledge in addition to the particular context. Recent work has focused primarily on answering questions given some relevant document or context, and required very little general background. To investigate question answering with prior knowledge, we present CommonsenseQA: a challenging new dataset for commonsense question answering. To capture common sense beyond associations, we extract from ConceptNet (Speer et al., 2017) multiple target concepts that have the same semantic relation to a single source concept. Crowd-workers are asked to author multiple-choice questions that mention the source concept and discriminate in turn between each of the target concepts. This encourages workers to create questions with complex semantics that often require prior knowledge. We create 12,247 questions through this procedure and demonstrate the difficulty of our task with a large number of strong baselines. Our best baseline is based on BERT-large (Devlin et al., 2018) and obtains 56% accuracy, well below human performance, which is 89%.

Abstract of CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge (arXiv:1811.00937, CC0)
19
Models scored in lab cards
5
Launch posts list it, from 3 labs
21
System cards report it, from 5 labs

PaLM 2-L leads with 90.4%

Best score per model as labs report them in their own cards. Labs pick their own settings, so these compare less cleanly than independent runs.

  1. 1 PaLM 2-L 90.4%
  2. 2 ChatGLM3-6B 86.5%
  3. 3 Llama 3.1-405B 85.8%
  4. 4 Nemotron 3.5 Super 120B-A12B Base 85.3%
  5. 5 Llama 3.1-70B 84.1%
  6. 6 Llama 3-70B 83.8%
  7. 7 phi-3-medium 14B 82.8%
  8. 8 Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B Base 81.1%
  9. 9 phi-3-mini 3.8B 80.2%
  10. 10 phi-3-small 7.4B 80%
  11. 11 Llama 2-70B 78.5%
  12. 12 Llama 3.1-8B 75%
  13. 13 Llama 2-34B 74.3%
  14. 14 Llama 3-8B 72.6%
  15. 15 BitNet b1.58 2B4T 71.6%
  16. 16 Gemma 7B 71.3%
  17. 17 Llama 2-13B 67.3%
  18. 18 Gemma 2B 65.3%
  19. 19 Llama 2-7B 57.8%

Source: Labs’ model cards

#ModelScoreSettingDateSource
1 PaLM 2-L 90.4% May 2023 Lab model card
2 ChatGLM3-6B 86.5% Jun 2024 Lab model card
3 Llama 3.1-405B 85.8% Jul 2024 Lab model card
4 Nemotron 3.5 Super 120B-A12B Base 85.3% Oct 2026 Lab model card
5 Llama 3.1-70B 84.1% Jul 2024 Lab model card
6 Llama 3-70B 83.8% Apr 2024 Lab model card
7 phi-3-medium 14B 82.8% Aug 2024 Lab model card
8 Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B Base 81.1% Oct 2026 Lab model card
9 phi-3-mini 3.8B 80.2% Aug 2024 Lab model card
10 phi-3-small 7.4B 80% Aug 2024 Lab model card
11 Llama 2-70B 78.5% Jul 2023 Lab model card
12 Llama 3.1-8B 75% Jul 2024 Lab model card
13 Llama 2-34B 74.3% Jul 2023 Lab model card
14 Llama 3-8B 72.6% Apr 2024 Lab model card
15 BitNet b1.58 2B4T 71.6% Apr 2025 Lab model card
16 Gemma 7B 71.3% Feb 2024 Lab model card
17 Llama 2-13B 67.3% Jul 2023 Lab model card
18 Gemma 2B 65.3% Mar 2024 Lab model card
19 Llama 2-7B 57.8% Jul 2023 Lab model card

Number one over time

Lab claims count from the day the card came out, independent runs from the model’s release.

Other labs
Lab claims Passed 85% in May 2023, by PaLM 2-L
PaLM 2-L 90.4%

Source: Labs’ model cards

Its lab’s own number for PaLM 2-L passed 85% in May 2023

All the scores we have, one dot each, so a model tested at several settings appears more than once.

Reported by the lab in its model card
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2023 2024 2025 2026 Near the ceiling (85%) PaLM 2-L 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 2023 2024 2025 2026 Near the ceiling (85%) PaLM 2-L

Source: Labs’ model cards

Labs dropped it from launch posts once the best score passed 85%

Launch posts from every lab that has listed it, one tick per post. Tall colored ticks include it, and short gray ones leave it out.

Google DeepMind
Meta
Microsoft
DateLaunch postScoreAs the post writes it
Apr 15, 2025 BitNet b1.58 2B4T 71.6 CommonsenseQA
Apr 22, 2024 phi-3-medium 14B 82.6 CommonSenseQA (10-Shot)
Apr 18, 2024 Llama 3-70B 83.8 CommonSenseQA (7-shot) [pretrained]
Feb 21, 2024 Gemma 7B 71.3 CommonsenseQA (7-shot)
May 10, 2023 PaLM 2-L 90.4 CSQA (7), CoT + SC

21 system cards report it, from 5 labs

Besides launch posts, we read the system cards, model cards and technical reports labs publish with a release. They report far more, including safety and frontier-risk tests.

DateDocumentScoreAs the document writes itSection
Oct 15, 2026 Nemotron 3.5 Super 120B-A12B Base technical report 85.3 CommonsenseQA, 7-shot acc, Table 6 Capabilities
Oct 15, 2026 Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B Base technical report 81.1 CommonsenseQA, 7-shot acc, Table 6 Capabilities
Apr 16, 2025 BitNet b1.58 2B4T technical report 71.6 CommonsenseQA (10-shot; Acc) (Table 1, Table 3) Capabilities
Nov 23, 2024 Llama 3.1-8B technical report 75 CommonSenseQA, pretrained (Table 11) Capabilities
Nov 23, 2024 Llama 3.1-70B technical report 84.1 CommonSenseQA, pretrained (Table 11) Capabilities
Nov 23, 2024 Llama 3.1-405B technical report 85.8 CommonSenseQA, pretrained (Table 11) Capabilities
Aug 30, 2024 phi-3-small 7.4B technical report 80 CommonSenseQA (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) Capabilities
Aug 30, 2024 phi-3-mini 3.8B technical report 80.2 CommonSenseQA (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) Capabilities
Aug 30, 2024 phi-3-medium 14B technical report 82.8 CommonSenseQA (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) Capabilities
Jul 23, 2024 Llama 3.1-8B model card 75 CommonSenseQA, 7-shot, acc_char, pretrained (Base pretrained models table) Capabilities
Jul 23, 2024 Llama 3.1-70B model card 84.1 CommonSenseQA, 7-shot, acc_char, pretrained (Base pretrained models table) Capabilities
Jul 23, 2024 Llama 3.1-405B model card 85.8 CommonSenseQA, 7-shot, acc_char, pretrained (Base pretrained models table) Capabilities
Jun 18, 2024 ChatGLM3-6B technical report 86.5 ChatGLM3-6B-Base, CommonSenseQA (Table 1) Capabilities
Apr 18, 2024 Llama 3-8B model card 72.6 CommonSenseQA (7-shot), pretrained (Base pretrained models table) Capabilities
Apr 18, 2024 Llama 3-70B model card 83.8 CommonSenseQA (7-shot), pretrained (Base pretrained models table) Capabilities
Mar 13, 2024 Gemma 7B technical report 71.3 CQA, PT, 7-shot (Table 6) Capabilities
Mar 13, 2024 Gemma 2B technical report 65.3 CQA, PT, 7-shot (Table 6) Capabilities
Jul 19, 2023 Llama 2-7B technical report 57.8 CSQA, 7-shot, pretrained (Table 20) Capabilities
Jul 19, 2023 Llama 2-70B technical report 78.5 CSQA, 7-shot, pretrained (Table 20) Capabilities
Jul 19, 2023 Llama 2-34B technical report 74.3 CSQA, 7-shot, pretrained (Table 20) Capabilities
Jul 19, 2023 Llama 2-13B technical report 67.3 CSQA, 7-shot, pretrained (Table 20) Capabilities

Versions

We switch the top row to each new version when it comes out. Open it for one row per version. An old version stays in play while people still test it, so whoever first takes it past 85% gets credit for closing it out.

Other labs Google DeepMind
CommonsenseQA 2.0 Not tested since Jul 2023
T5-11B 67.8%
CommonSenseQA Passed 85% in May 2023, by PaLM 2-L
PaLM 2-L 90.4%
CommonsenseQA 2.0 Not tested since Jul 2023
T5-11B 67.8%

Sources: Labs’ model cards and claims collected by Epoch AI (CC BY 4.0)

More in Knowledge

All 121 in Knowledge
  • MMLU-Pro In use Harder 10-option version of MMLU with reasoning-focused questions across 14 subjects. Intern-S2-397B 89.8%
  • SuperGPQA In use 26,529 graduate-level multiple-choice questions across 285 disciplines. Accuracy. Qwen 3.6 Max (Preview) 73.9%
  • WideSearch In use 200 bilingual broad info-seeking tasks: agent collects many atomic facts into a table. Scored by success rate and row/item F1. Tencent Hy4 preview 83.9%
  • BBEH micro average In use Models solve harder replacements for each of the 23 BIG-Bench Hard tasks, 4,520 examples in total. The score is the share of all examples answered correctly. Gemma 4 31B IT 74.4%
  • KMMLU-Pro In use Models answer multiple-choice questions taken from Korean National Professional Licensure exams. It tests professional knowledge used in Korean industry. Solar Pro 4 79.2%
  • HLE-Verified In use Verified and revised version of Humanity's Last Exam (1,811 items) with uncertain items removed. Seed2.0 Pro 73.6%