@inproceedings{sun-etal-2024-apollo,
    title = "{APOLLO}: An Optimized Training Approach for Long-form Numerical Reasoning",
    author = "Sun, Jiashuo  and
      Zhang, Hang  and
      Lin, Chen  and
      Su, Xiangdong  and
      Gong, Yeyun  and
      Guo, Jian",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.122",
    pages = "1370--1382",
    abstract = "Long-form numerical reasoning aims to generate a reasoning program to calculate the answer for a given question. Previous work followed a retriever-generator framework, where the retriever selects key facts from a long-form document, and the generator generates a reasoning program based on the retrieved facts. However, they treated all facts equally without considering the different contributions of facts with and without numerical information. Furthermore, they ignored program consistency, leading to the wrong punishment of programs that differed from the ground truth. In order to address these issues, we proposed APOLLO (An optimized training aPproach fOr Long-form numericaL reasOning), to improve long-form numerical reasoning. APOLLO includes a number-aware negative sampling strategy for the retriever to discriminate key numerical facts, and a consistency-based reinforcement learning with target program augmentation for the generator to ultimately increase the execution accuracy. Experimental results on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboards verify the effectiveness of our proposed methods, achieving the new state-of-the-art.",
}

Long-form numerical reasoning aims to generate a reasoning program to calculate the answer for a given question. Previous work followed a retriever-generator framework, where the retriever selects key facts from a long-form document, and the generator generates a reasoning program based on the retrieved facts. However, they treated all facts equally without considering the different contributions of facts with and without numerical information. Furthermore, they ignored program consistency, leading to the wrong punishment of programs that differed from the ground truth. In order to address these issues, we proposed APOLLO (An optimized training aPproach fOr Long-form numericaL reasOning), to improve long-form numerical reasoning. APOLLO includes a number-aware negative sampling strategy for the retriever to discriminate key numerical facts, and a consistency-based reinforcement learning with target program augmentation for the generator to ultimately increase the execution accuracy. Experimental results on the FinQA and ConvFinQA leaderboards verify the effectiveness of our proposed methods, achieving the new state-of-the-art.
Sun, Jiashuo Zhang, Hang Lin, Chen Su, Xiangdong Gong, Yeyun Guo, Jian
APOLLO: An Optimized Training Approach for Long-form Numerical Reasoning