# Cooperative Self-training of Machine Reading Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07449 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07449/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs.
- Builds on 34 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2021.

## Placed in

- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/synth/synthetic-reasoning-data-and-bootstrapping/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [Self-critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00563/) (2016)
- [SeqGAN: Sequence Generative Adversarial Nets with Policy Gradient](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05473/) (2016)
- [NIPS 2016 Tutorial: Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00160/) (2016)
- [Emergence of Grounded Compositional Language in Multi-Agent Populations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04908/) (2017)
- [PAQ: 65 Million Probably-Asked Questions and What You Can Do With Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07033/) (2021)
- [Multi-Agent Cooperation and the Emergence of (Natural) Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07182/) (2016)
- [MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09753/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Self-Training for Neural Sequence Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13788/) (2019)
- [Beat the AI: Investigating Adversarial Human Annotation for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00293/) (2020)
- [Emergence of Language with Multi-agent Games: Learning to Communicate with Sequences of Symbols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.11192/) (2017)
- [ConveRT: Efficient and Accurate Conversational Representations from Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03688/) (2019)
- [Training Question Answering Models From Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09599/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Adaptation of Question Answering Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06028/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Question Answering by Cloze Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04980/) (2019)
- [Question Answering and Question Generation as Dual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02027/) (2017)
- [Span Selection Pre-training for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04120/) (2019)
- [Mutual Information and Diverse Decoding Improve Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00372/) (2016)
- [StructFormer: Joint Unsupervised Induction of Dependency and Constituency Structure from Masked Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00857/) (2020)
- [Straight to the Tree: Constituency Parsing with Neural Syntactic Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04168/) (2018)
- [Generating Diverse and Consistent QA pairs from Contexts with Information-Maximizing Hierarchical Conditional VAEs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13837/) (2020)
- [AutoQA: From Databases To QA Semantic Parsers With Only Synthetic Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04806/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Self-Specialization: Uncovering Latent Expertise within Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00160/) (2023)
- [CItruS: Chunked Instruction-aware State Eviction for Long Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12018/) (2024)
- [Domain-Expanded ASTE: Rethinking Generalization in Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14434/) (2023)
- [S2M: Converting Single-Turn to Multi-Turn Datasets for Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16511/) (2023)
- [Entailment as Robust Self-Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17197/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pretrained language models have significantly improved the performance of downstream language understanding tasks, including extractive question answering, by providing high-quality contextualized word embeddings. However, training question answering models still requires large amounts of annotated data for specific domains. In this work, we propose a cooperative self-training framework, RGX, for automatically generating more non-trivial question-answer pairs to improve model performance. RGX is built upon a masked answer extraction task with an interactive learning environment containing an answer entity Recognizer, a question Generator, and an answer eXtractor. Given a passage with a masked entity, the generator generates a question around the entity, and the extractor is trained to extract the masked entity with the generated question and raw texts. The framework allows the training of question generation and answering models on any text corpora without annotation. Experiment results show that RGX outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) pretrained language models and transfer learning approaches on standard question-answering benchmarks, and yields the new SOTA performance under given model size and transfer learning settings.