  Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success in
natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Up to now, most NLG-oriented PLMs are
pre-trained in an unsupervised manner using the large-scale general corpus. In
the meanwhile, an increasing number of models pre-trained with labeled data
(i.e. "supervised pre-training") showcase superior performance compared to
unsupervised pre-trained models. Motivated by the success of supervised
pre-training, we propose Multi-task superVised Pre-training (MVP) for natural
language generation. We collect a large-scale natural language generation
corpus, MVPCorpus, from $77$ datasets over $11$ diverse NLG tasks. Then we
unify these examples into a general text-to-text format to pre-train the text
generation model MVP in a supervised manner. For each task, we further
pre-train specific soft prompts to stimulate the model's capacity to perform a
specific task. Our MVP model can be seen as a practice that utilizes recent
instruction tuning on relatively small PLMs. Extensive experiments have
demonstrated the effectiveness and generality of our MVP model in a number of
NLG tasks, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on $13$ out of $17$
datasets, outperforming BART by $9.3\%$ and Flan-T5 by $5.8\%$.
