{"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/how-helpful-is-inverse-reinforcement-learning","title":"How Helpful is Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Table-to-Text Generation?","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-08-01","proceeding":"ACL 2021 5","authors":["Sayan Ghosh","Zheng Qi","Snigdha Chaturvedi","Shashank Srivastava"],"abstract":"Existing approaches for the Table-to-Text task suffer from issues such as missing information, hallucination and repetition. Many approaches to this problem use Reinforcement Learning (RL), which maximizes a single manually defined reward, such as BLEU. In this work, we instead pose the Table-to-Text task as Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem. We explore using multiple interpretable unsupervised reward components that are combined linearly to form a composite reward function. The composite reward function and the description generator are learned jointly. We find that IRL outperforms strong RL baselines marginally. We further study the generalization of learned IRL rewards in scenarios involving domain adaptation. Our experiments reveal significant challenges in using IRL for this task.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.11","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.11.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":"how-helpful-is-inverse-reinforcement-learning","repo_url":"https://github.com/issacqzh/irl_table2text","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"domain-adaptation","task_name":"Domain Adaptation"},{"task_slug":"hallucination","task_name":"Hallucination"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"table-to-text-generation","task_name":"Table-to-Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}