{"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/robust-controlled-table-to-text-generation-1","title":"Robust (Controlled) Table-to-Text Generation with Structure-Aware Equivariance Learning","arxiv_id":"2205.03972","date":"2022-05-08","proceeding":"NAACL 2022 7","authors":["Fei Wang","Zhewei Xu","Pedro Szekely","Muhao Chen"],"abstract":"Controlled table-to-text generation seeks to generate natural language descriptions for highlighted subparts of a table. Previous SOTA systems still employ a sequence-to-sequence generation method, which merely captures the table as a linear structure and is brittle when table layouts change. We seek to go beyond this paradigm by (1) effectively expressing the relations of content pieces in the table, and (2) making our model robust to content-invariant structural transformations. Accordingly, we propose an equivariance learning framework, which encodes tables with a structure-aware self-attention mechanism. This prunes the full self-attention structure into an order-invariant graph attention that captures the connected graph structure of cells belonging to the same row or column, and it differentiates between relevant cells and irrelevant cells from the structural perspective. Our framework also modifies the positional encoding mechanism to preserve the relative position of tokens in the same cell but enforce position invariance among different cells. Our technology is free to be plugged into existing table-to-text generation models, and has improved T5-based models to offer better performance on ToTTo and HiTab. Moreover, on a harder version of ToTTo, we preserve promising performance, while previous SOTA systems, even with transformation-based data augmentation, have seen significant performance drops. Our code is available at https://github.com/luka-group/Lattice.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.03972v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.03972v1.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":"robust-controlled-table-to-text-generation-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/luka-group/lattice","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"data-augmentation","task_name":"Data Augmentation"},{"task_slug":"data-to-text-generation","task_name":"Data-to-Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"graph-attention","task_name":"Graph Attention"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Position"},{"task_slug":"table-to-text-generation","task_name":"Table-to-Text Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-generation","task_name":"Text Generation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/data-to-text-generation-on-totto","task":"Data-to-Text Generation","dataset":"ToTTo","model":"LATTICE (T5-base)","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":6,"metrics":{"BLEU":"48.4","PARENT":"58.1"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2205.03972","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2205.03972"}},"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/luka-group/lattice","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"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":"e469160f9e5731df","entry":"rewrite_encoder_attention_mask","repo":"luka-group/lattice","repo_kind":"official","path":"model/structural_attention.py","file_url":"https://github.com/luka-group/lattice/blob/HEAD/model/structural_attention.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e469160f9e5731df"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}