Enhancing Text Generation with Cooperative Training

Abstract: Recently, there has been a surge in the use of generated data to enhance the performance of downstream models, largely due to the advancements in pre-trained LLMs. However, most prevailing methods trained generative and discriminative models in isolation, which left them unable to adapt to changes in each other. These approaches lead to generative models that are prone to deviating from the true data distribution and providing limited benefits to discriminative models. While some works have proposed jointly training generative and discriminative LLMs, their methods remain challenging due to the non-differentiable nature of discrete data. To overcome these issues, we introduce a \textit{self-consistent learning} framework in the text field that involves training a discriminator and generator cooperatively in a closed-loop manner until a scoring consensus is reached. By learning directly from selected samples, our framework are able to mitigate training instabilities such as mode collapse and non-convergence. Extensive experiments on four downstream benchmarks, including AFQMC, CHIP-STS, QQP, and MRPC, demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework.