通过迭代奖励引导训练,让表格语言模型自动生成更优质、更私密的合成数据。
Self-Improving Tabular Language Models via Iterative Reward-Guided Post-Training

- 用分组相对优势对齐法,比较高/低奖励生成组,提升模型性能。
- 在五项混合类型基准上超越监督微调,兼顾真实度、实用性与隐私保护。
- 支持分类器有无的奖励机制,适合需要持续优化合成数据的场景。
表格语言模型可将行视为标记序列来生成合成表格,但通常仅通过监督微调训练一次后即作为静态生成器使用。这存在局限性,因为下一标记似然并不直接优化用于评估合成数据的分布特性、实用性和不可区分性。本文提出一种迭代奖励引导后训练框架,采用生成-评分-对齐协议:生成器采样合成行,任务指定奖励对其进行排序,模型基于固定监督参考进行更新。在此框架中,提出TabGRAA(表格组相对优势对齐),通过组平均策略/参考对数比值而非一对一偏好对,比较高、低奖励生成组。在五个混合类型基准上,TabGRAA在GReaT主干模型上优于额外监督微调,且在适应后的DPO、KTO、NPO基线中实现了最佳的真实度与下游实用性权衡,同时保持接近监督基线的隐私诊断水平。消融实验表明,性能提升依赖于有意义的奖励排序和稳定的组级更新,而非单纯增加训练次数。奖励替换与评分器分离研究进一步显示,该后训练循环可使用基于分类器和无分类器的奖励,且适当的评分器分离对维持真实度-实用性-隐私权衡至关重要。这些结果使TabGRAA成为表格语言模型生成器的自提升后训练方法,可与强健的静态合成器互补。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Tabular language models can generate synthetic tables by modeling rows as token sequences, but they are typically trained once with supervised fine-tuning and then used as static synthesizers. This is limiting because next-token likelihood does not directly optimize the distributional, utility, and indistinguishability properties used to evaluate synthetic data. We study iterative reward-guided post-training for tabular language models through a generate--score--align protocol, where a generator samples synthetic rows, a task-specified reward ranks them, and the model is updated relative to a fixed supervised reference. Within this protocol, we propose \textbf{TabGRAA} (\textbf{Tab}ular \textbf{G}roup-\textbf{R}elative \textbf{A}dvantage \textbf{A}lignment), a group-relative alignment method that compares high- and low-reward generated groups using group-averaged policy/reference log-ratios rather than one-to-one preference pairs. Across five mixed-type benchmarks, TabGRAA improves a GReaT backbone beyond additional supervised fine-tuning and achieves the strongest average trade-off among adapted DPO, KTO, and NPO baselines on fidelity and downstream utility, while maintaining empirical privacy diagnostics near the supervised baseline. Ablations show that the gains depend on meaningful reward ranking and stable group-level updates rather than extra training alone. Reward-substitution and scorer-separation studies further show that the post-training loop can use both classifier-based and classifier-free rewards, and that proper scorer separation is important for preserving the fidelity--utility--privacy trade-off. These results position TabGRAA as a self-improving post-training method for tabular language-model generators, complementary to strong static tabular synthesizers.
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