# BRAINTEASER: Lateral Thinking Puzzles for Large Language Models

Source: [BRAINTEASER: Lateral Thinking Puzzles for Large Language Models](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa71201e209131cea4f566>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T01:58:41.298Z

Authors: Yifan Jiang, Filip Ilievski, Kaixin Ma, Zhivar Sourati

Published: 2023-10-08T07:46:01.000Z

## Abstract

The success of language models has inspired the NLP community to attend to tasks that require implicit and complex reasoning, relying on human-like commonsense mechanisms. While such vertical thinking tasks have been relatively popular, lateral thinking puzzles have received little attention. To bridge this gap, we devise BRAINTEASER: a multiple-choice Question Answering task designed to test the model's ability to exhibit lateral thinking and defy default commonsense associations. We design a three-step procedure for creating the first lateral thinking benchmark, consisting of data collection, distractor generation, and generation of adversarial examples, leading to 1,100 puzzles with high-quality annotations. To assess the consistency of lateral reasoning by models, we enrich BRAINTEASER based on a semantic and contextual reconstruction of its questions. Our experiments with state-of-the-art instruction- and commonsense language models reveal a significant gap between human and model performance, which is further widened when consistency across adversarial formats is considered. We make all of our code and data available to stimulate work on developing and evaluating lateral thinking models.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Lateral Thinking on BRAINTEASER Word Puzzle SemEval 2024 Task 9 (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/lateral-thinking-on-brainteaser-word-puzzle-semeval-2024-task-9-test.md>): Lateral Thinking; BRAINTEASER Word Puzzle SemEval 2024 Task 9 (test); Original Score: 91.7.

- [Lateral Thinking on BRAINTEASER Sentence Puzzle SemEval 2024 Task 9 (test)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/lateral-thinking-on-brainteaser-sentence-puzzle-semeval-2024-task-9-test.md>): Lateral Thinking; BRAINTEASER Sentence Puzzle SemEval 2024 Task 9 (test); Original Score: 90.7.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05057>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.05057.pdf>)