KEST: Kernel Distance Based Efficient Self-Training for Improving Controllable Text Generation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Self-training (ST) has come to fruition in language understanding tasks by producing pseudo labels, which reduces the labeling bottleneck of language model fine-tuning. Nevertheless, in facilitating semi-supervised controllable language generation, ST faces two key challenges. First, augmented by self-generated pseudo text, generation models tend to over-exploit the previously learned text distribution, suffering from mode collapse and poor generation diversity. Second, generating pseudo text in each iteration is time-consuming, severely decelerating the training process. In this work, we propose KEST, a novel and efficient self-training framework to handle these problems. KEST utilizes a kernel-based loss, rather than standard cross entropy, to learn from the soft pseudo text produced by a shared non-autoregressive generator. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that KEST can benefit from more diverse pseudo text in an efficient manner, which allows not only refining and exploiting the previously fitted distribution but also enhanced exploration towards a larger potential text space, providing a guarantee of improved performance. Experiments on three controllable generation tasks demonstrate that KEST significantly improves control accuracy while maintaining comparable text fluency and generation diversity against several strong baselines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".