English

Self-Supervised Test-Time Learning for Reading Comprehension

Computation and Language 2021-03-23 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Recent work on unsupervised question answering has shown that models can be trained with procedurally generated question-answer pairs and can achieve performance competitive with supervised methods. In this work, we consider the task of unsupervised reading comprehension and present a method that performs "test-time learning" (TTL) on a given context (text passage), without requiring training on large-scale human-authored datasets containing \textit{context-question-answer} triplets. This method operates directly on a single test context, uses self-supervision to train models on synthetically generated question-answer pairs, and then infers answers to unseen human-authored questions for this context. Our method achieves accuracies competitive with fully supervised methods and significantly outperforms current unsupervised methods. TTL methods with a smaller model are also competitive with the current state-of-the-art in unsupervised reading comprehension.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.11263,
  title  = {Self-Supervised Test-Time Learning for Reading Comprehension},
  author = {Pratyay Banerjee and Tejas Gokhale and Chitta Baral},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.11263},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

Accepted to NAACL 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:23:14.320Z