Papers › Curriculum-Based Self-Training Makes Better Few-Shot Learners for Data-to-Text Generation

Curriculum-Based Self-Training Makes Better Few-Shot Learners for Data-to-Text Generation

6 Jun 2022arXiv:2206.02712archive 2025-07-28

Pei Ke, Haozhe Ji, Zhenyu Yang, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Xiaoyan Zhu, Minlie Huang

Despite the success of text-to-text pre-trained models in various natural language generation (NLG) tasks, the generation performance is largely restricted by the number of labeled data in downstream tasks, particularly in data-to-text generation tasks. Existing works mostly utilize abundant unlabeled structured data to conduct unsupervised pre-training for task adaption, which fail to model the complex relationship between source structured data and target texts. Thus, we introduce self-training as a better few-shot learner than task-adaptive pre-training, which explicitly captures this relationship via pseudo-labeled data generated by the pre-trained model. To alleviate the side-effect of low-quality pseudo-labeled data during self-training, we propose a novel method called Curriculum-Based Self-Training (CBST) to effectively leverage unlabeled data in a rearranged order determined by the difficulty of text generation. Experimental results show that our method can outperform fine-tuning and task-adaptive pre-training methods, and achieve state-of-the-art performance in the few-shot setting of data-to-text generation.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

kepei1106/cbst officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Data-to-Text GenerationText GenerationUnsupervised Pre-training

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections