# R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.12467 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12467/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [A large annotated corpus for learning natural language inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.05326/) (2015)
- [A Call for Clarity in Reporting BLEU Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08771/) (2018)
- [Adafactor: Adaptive Learning Rates with Sublinear Memory Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04235/) (2018)
- [On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00661/) (2020)
- [Neural Text Generation with Unlikelihood Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04319/) (2019)
- [TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02164/) (2019)
- [ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14373/) (2020)
- [The E2E Dataset: New Challenges For End-to-End Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09254/) (2017)
- [UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05966/) (2022)
- [Challenges in Data-to-Document Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08052/) (2017)
- [A Contrastive Framework for Neural Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06417/) (2022)
- [Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09902/) (2017)
- [FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00369/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Evaluation Metrics Used for NLG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12009/) (2020)
- [BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16804/) (2022)
- [Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06935/) (2022)
- [Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04434/) (2017)
- [SimCLS: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01890/) (2021)
- [Annotating and Modeling Fine-grained Factuality in Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04302/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Factuality in Generation with Dependency-level Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05478/) (2020)
- [CLIFF: Contrastive Learning for Improving Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09209/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [ReasTAP: Injecting Table Reasoning Skills During Pre-training via Synthetic Reasoning Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12374/) (2022)
- [Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of LLMs in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14987/) (2023)
- [Innovations in Neural Data-to-text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12571/) (2022)
- [LoFT: Enhancing Faithfulness and Diversity for Table-to-Text Generation via Logic Form Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02962/) (2023)
- [QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14303/) (2023)
- [OpeNLGauge: An Explainable Metric for NLG Evaluation with Open-Weights LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11858/) (2025)
- [Medical Text Simplification: Optimizing for Readability with Unlikelihood Training and Reranked Beam Search Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11191/) (2023)
- [FreshTab: Sourcing Fresh Data for Table-to-Text Generation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13598/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unfaithful text generation is a common problem for text generation systems. In the case of Data-to-Text (D2T) systems, the factuality of the generated text is particularly crucial for any real-world applications. We introduce R2D2, a training framework that addresses unfaithful Data-to-Text generation by training a system both as a generator and a faithfulness discriminator with additional replacement detection and unlikelihood learning tasks. To facilitate such training, we propose two methods for sampling unfaithful sentences. We argue that the poor entity retrieval capability of D2T systems is one of the primary sources of unfaithfulness, so in addition to the existing metrics, we further propose NER-based metrics to evaluate the fidelity of D2T generations. Our experimental results show that R2D2 systems could effectively mitigate the unfaithful text generation, and they achieve new state-of-the-art results on FeTaQA, LogicNLG, and ToTTo, all with significant improvements.