{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/exploiting-asymmetry-for-synthetic-training","title":"Exploiting Asymmetry for Synthetic Training Data Generation: SynthIE and the Case of Information Extraction","arxiv_id":"2303.04132","date":"2023-03-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Martin Josifoski","Marija Sakota","Maxime Peyrard","Robert West"],"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) have great potential for synthetic data generation. This work shows that useful data can be synthetically generated even for tasks that cannot be solved directly by LLMs: for problems with structured outputs, it is possible to prompt an LLM to perform the task in the reverse direction, by generating plausible input text for a target output structure. Leveraging this asymmetry in task difficulty makes it possible to produce large-scale, high-quality data for complex tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on closed information extraction, where collecting ground-truth data is challenging, and no satisfactory dataset exists to date. We synthetically generate a dataset of 1.8M data points, establish its superior quality compared to existing datasets in a human evaluation, and use it to finetune small models (220M and 770M parameters), termed SynthIE, that outperform the prior state of the art (with equal model size) by a substantial margin of 57 absolute points in micro-F1 and 79 points in macro-F1. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/SynthIE.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04132v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.04132v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"exploiting-asymmetry-for-synthetic-training","repo_url":"https://github.com/epfl-dlab/synthie","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"synthetic-data-generation","task_name":"Synthetic Data Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2303.04132","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2303.04132"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/epfl-dlab/synthie","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/epfl-dlab/SynthIE","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"9c4e1d92f6b083ca","entry":"get_score_from_metric","repo":"epfl-dlab/SynthIE","repo_kind":"official","path":"run_process_predictions.py","file_url":"https://github.com/epfl-dlab/SynthIE/blob/HEAD/run_process_predictions.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"9c4e1d92f6b083ca"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}