Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Salemi, Alireza, Zamani, Hamed
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Salemi, Alireza
Zamani, Hamed
author_facet Salemi, Alireza
Zamani, Hamed
contents Personalization is crucial for enhancing both the effectiveness and user satisfaction of language technologies, particularly in information-seeking tasks like question answering. Current approaches for personalizing large language models (LLMs) often rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), followed by reinforcement learning with scalar reward signals to teach models how to use retrieved personal context. We believe that these scalar rewards sometimes provide weak, non-instructive feedback, limiting learning efficiency and personalization quality. We introduce VAC, a novel framework for personalized response generation that replaces scalar rewards with natural language feedback (NLF) that are generated conditioned on the user profiles and the question narratives. NLF serves as a rich and actionable supervision signal, allowing the policy model to iteratively refine its outputs and internalize effective personalization strategies. Training alternates between optimizing the feedback model and fine-tuning the policy model on the improved responses, resulting in a policy model that no longer requires feedback at inference. Evaluation on the LaMP-QA benchmark that consists of three diverse domains demonstrates consistent and significant improvements over the state-of-the-art results. Human evaluations further confirm the superior quality of the generated responses. These results demonstrate that NLF provides more effective signals for optimizing personalized question answering.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10695
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering
Salemi, Alireza
Zamani, Hamed
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Personalization is crucial for enhancing both the effectiveness and user satisfaction of language technologies, particularly in information-seeking tasks like question answering. Current approaches for personalizing large language models (LLMs) often rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), followed by reinforcement learning with scalar reward signals to teach models how to use retrieved personal context. We believe that these scalar rewards sometimes provide weak, non-instructive feedback, limiting learning efficiency and personalization quality. We introduce VAC, a novel framework for personalized response generation that replaces scalar rewards with natural language feedback (NLF) that are generated conditioned on the user profiles and the question narratives. NLF serves as a rich and actionable supervision signal, allowing the policy model to iteratively refine its outputs and internalize effective personalization strategies. Training alternates between optimizing the feedback model and fine-tuning the policy model on the improved responses, resulting in a policy model that no longer requires feedback at inference. Evaluation on the LaMP-QA benchmark that consists of three diverse domains demonstrates consistent and significant improvements over the state-of-the-art results. Human evaluations further confirm the superior quality of the generated responses. These results demonstrate that NLF provides more effective signals for optimizing personalized question answering.
title Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10695