Papers › NT5?! Training T5 to Perform Numerical Reasoning

NT5?! Training T5 to Perform Numerical Reasoning

15 Apr 2021arXiv:2104.07307archive 2025-07-28

Peng-Jian Yang, Ying Ting Chen, Yuechan Chen, Daniel Cer

Numerical reasoning over text (NRoT) presents unique challenges that are not well addressed by existing pre-training objectives. We explore five sequential training schedules that adapt a pre-trained T5 model for NRoT. Our final model is adapted from T5, but further pre-trained on three datasets designed to strengthen skills necessary for NRoT and general reading comprehension before being fine-tuned on the Discrete Reasoning over Text (DROP) dataset. The training improves DROP's adjusted F1 performance (a numeracy-focused score) from 45.90 to 70.83. Our model closes in on GenBERT (72.4), a custom BERT-Base model using the same datasets with significantly more parameters. We show that training the T5 multitasking framework with multiple numerical reasoning datasets of increasing difficulty, good performance on DROP can be achieved without manually engineering partitioned functionality between distributed and symbol modules.

PaperPDFCode

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

Code

lesterpjy/numeric-t5 officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubMIT 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

Reading Comprehension

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

AdafactorAttentionAttention DropoutBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGated Linear UnitInverse Square Root ScheduleLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSentencePieceSoftmaxT5

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