CommonSenseQA
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.
- Made by
- Tel Aviv University and Allen Institute for AI
- 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%.
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.
- 90.4 PaLM 2-L
- 86.5 ChatGLM3-6B
- 85.8
Llama 3.1-405B
- 85.3
Nemotron 3.5 Super 120B-A12B Base
- 84.1
Llama 3.1-70B
- 83.8
Llama 3-70B
- 82.8
phi-3-medium 14B
- 81.1
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B Base
- 80.2
phi-3-mini 3.8B
- 80.0
phi-3-small 7.4B
- 78.5
Llama 2-70B
- 75.0
Llama 3.1-8B
- 74.3
Llama 2-34B
- 72.6
Llama 3-8B
- 71.6
BitNet b1.58 2B4T
- 71.3
Gemma 7B
- 67.3
Llama 2-13B
- 65.3
Gemma 2B
- 57.8
Llama 2-7B
- 1 PaLM 2-L 90.4%
- 2 ChatGLM3-6B 86.5%
- 3
Llama 3.1-405B 85.8%
- 4
Nemotron 3.5 Super 120B-A12B Base 85.3%
- 5
Llama 3.1-70B 84.1%
- 6
Llama 3-70B 83.8%
- 7
phi-3-medium 14B 82.8%
- 8
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B Base 81.1%
- 9
phi-3-mini 3.8B 80.2%
- 10
phi-3-small 7.4B 80%
- 11
Llama 2-70B 78.5%
- 12
Llama 3.1-8B 75%
- 13
Llama 2-34B 74.3%
- 14
Llama 3-8B 72.6%
- 15
BitNet b1.58 2B4T 71.6%
- 16
Gemma 7B 71.3%
- 17
Llama 2-13B 67.3%
- 18
Gemma 2B 65.3%
- 19
Llama 2-7B 57.8%
Source: Labs’ model cards
| # | Model | Score | Setting | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PaLM 2-L | 90.4% | May 2023 | Lab model card | |
| 2 | ChatGLM3-6B | 86.5% | Jun 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 3 | | 85.8% | Jul 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 4 | | 85.3% | Oct 2026 | Lab model card | |
| 5 | | 84.1% | Jul 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 6 | | 83.8% | Apr 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 7 | | 82.8% | Aug 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 8 | | 81.1% | Oct 2026 | Lab model card | |
| 9 | | 80.2% | Aug 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 10 | | 80% | Aug 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 11 | | 78.5% | Jul 2023 | Lab model card | |
| 12 | | 75% | Jul 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 13 | | 74.3% | Jul 2023 | Lab model card | |
| 14 | | 72.6% | Apr 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 15 | | 71.6% | Apr 2025 | Lab model card | |
| 16 | | 71.3% | Feb 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 17 | | 67.3% | Jul 2023 | Lab model card | |
| 18 | | 65.3% | Mar 2024 | Lab model card | |
| 19 | | 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.
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.
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.
| Date | Launch post | Score | As the post writes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 15, 2025 | 71.6 | CommonsenseQA | |
| Apr 22, 2024 | 82.6 | CommonSenseQA (10-Shot) | |
| Apr 18, 2024 | 83.8 | CommonSenseQA (7-shot) [pretrained] | |
| Feb 21, 2024 | 71.3 | CommonsenseQA (7-shot) | |
| May 10, 2023 | 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.
| Date | Document | Score | As the document writes it | Section |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 15, 2026 | | 85.3 | CommonsenseQA, 7-shot acc, Table 6 | Capabilities |
| Oct 15, 2026 | | 81.1 | CommonsenseQA, 7-shot acc, Table 6 | Capabilities |
| Apr 16, 2025 | | 71.6 | CommonsenseQA (10-shot; Acc) (Table 1, Table 3) | Capabilities |
| Nov 23, 2024 | | 75 | CommonSenseQA, pretrained (Table 11) | Capabilities |
| Nov 23, 2024 | | 84.1 | CommonSenseQA, pretrained (Table 11) | Capabilities |
| Nov 23, 2024 | | 85.8 | CommonSenseQA, pretrained (Table 11) | Capabilities |
| Aug 30, 2024 | | 80 | CommonSenseQA (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) | Capabilities |
| Aug 30, 2024 | | 80.2 | CommonSenseQA (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) | Capabilities |
| Aug 30, 2024 | | 82.8 | CommonSenseQA (10-Shot) (Section 3 table) | Capabilities |
| Jul 23, 2024 | | 75 | CommonSenseQA, 7-shot, acc_char, pretrained (Base pretrained models table) | Capabilities |
| Jul 23, 2024 | | 84.1 | CommonSenseQA, 7-shot, acc_char, pretrained (Base pretrained models table) | Capabilities |
| Jul 23, 2024 | | 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 | | 72.6 | CommonSenseQA (7-shot), pretrained (Base pretrained models table) | Capabilities |
| Apr 18, 2024 | | 83.8 | CommonSenseQA (7-shot), pretrained (Base pretrained models table) | Capabilities |
| Mar 13, 2024 | | 71.3 | CQA, PT, 7-shot (Table 6) | Capabilities |
| Mar 13, 2024 | | 65.3 | CQA, PT, 7-shot (Table 6) | Capabilities |
| Jul 19, 2023 | | 57.8 | CSQA, 7-shot, pretrained (Table 20) | Capabilities |
| Jul 19, 2023 | | 78.5 | CSQA, 7-shot, pretrained (Table 20) | Capabilities |
| Jul 19, 2023 | | 74.3 | CSQA, 7-shot, pretrained (Table 20) | Capabilities |
| Jul 19, 2023 | | 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.
Sources: Labs’ model cards and claims collected by Epoch AI (CC BY 4.0)
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