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Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering

sigir26-222 · Full research paper · Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani
Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain · 50% Personalized Question Answering and · 25% Personalized LLM Adaptation · 25%
Abstract

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.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Idan Szpektor
56
73 On the Robustness of Dialogue History Representation in Conversational Question Answering: A Comprehensive Study and a New Prompt-based Method (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval
72 Learning from the past: answering new questions with past answers (2012) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
72 Will My Question Be Answered? Predicting "Question Answerability" in Community Question-Answering Sites (2013) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
2 Wenlin Zhang 0001
47
63 Personalized Deep Research: A User-Centric Framework, Dataset, and Hybrid Evaluation for Knowledge Discovery (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation
62 Bridging Personalization and AI: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG
62 A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Jun Xu 0001 43
Area-chair candidates (7)
Jun Xu 0001 assigned 432 papers
Xiaoxi Li 0005 4215 papers
Xiaoxue Zang 414 papers
Zhijing Wu 0001 419 papers
Hongjin Qian 4012 papers
Pengyue Jia 4010 papers
Kam-Fai Wong 406 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Idan Szpektor assigned 56 3
73 On the Robustness of Dialogue History Representation in Conversational Question Answering: A Comprehensive Study and a New Prompt-based Method (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval
72 Learning from the past: answering new questions with past answers (2012) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
2 Farzad Shami 49 3
72 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA (2026) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
38 Benchmarking Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Validation (2026) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
3 Jing Liu 0022 48 3
72 A Regularized Competition Model for Question Difficulty Estimation in Community Question Answering Services (2014) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
69 Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmentation (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
4 Wenlin Zhang 0001 assigned 47 3
63 Personalized Deep Research: A User-Centric Framework, Dataset, and Hybrid Evaluation for Knowledge Discovery (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation
62 Bridging Personalization and AI: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG
5 Chen Zhao 0013 47 3
72 A dataset and baselines for sequential open-domain question answering (2018) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
59 SportReason: Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning across Tables and Text for Sports Question Answering (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
6 Mariano Barone 46 3
69 A Multilingual Multimodal Medical Examination Dataset for Visual Question Answering in Healthcare (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
66 SOLVE-Med: Specialized Orchestration for Leading Vertical Experts Across Medical Specialties (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
7 Adam Jatowt COI: co-author 45 3
69 ArchivalQA: A Large-scale Benchmark Dataset for Open-Domain Question Answering over Historical News Collections (2022) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
47 Wrong Answers Can Also Be Useful: PlausibleQA - A Large-Scale QA Dataset with Answer Plausibility Scores (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
8 Yang Zhang 0072 45 3
53 Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation
52 Don't Start Over: A Cost-Effective Framework for Migrating Personalized Prompts Between LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment
9 Kaixin Ma 45 3
71 Chain-of-Skills: A Configurable Model for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
71 Open Domain Question Answering with A Unified Knowledge Interface (2022) Multimodal and Graph RAG
10 Yingyi Zhang 0001 45 3
70 Personalized Deep Research: A User-Centric Framework, Dataset, and Hybrid Evaluation for Knowledge Discovery (2026) Deep Research and Report Generation
69 Bridging Personalization and AI: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG
11 Falk Scholer COI: co-author 44 3
71 Ranking Documents by Answer-Passage Quality (2018) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
71 Document Summarization for Answering Non-Factoid Queries (2018) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
12 Jinheon Baek 44 3
73 Realistic Conversational Question Answering with Answer Selection based on Calibrated Confidence and Uncertainty Measurement (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval
71 Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Small Language Models in Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
13 Wenyu Huang 43 3
57 Prompting large language models with knowledge graphs for question answering involving long-tail facts (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
47 Masking in Multi-hop QA: An Analysis of How Language Models Perform with Context Permutation (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
14 Ori Yoran 43 3
58 Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
52 MultiModalQA: complex question answering over text, tables and images (2021) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others
16 Jialong Wu 0007 43 3
52 PROPER: A Progressive Learning Framework for Personalized Large Language Models with Group-Level Adaptation (2025) Efficiency and Deployment
44 AdaRewriter: Unleashing the Power of Prompting-based Conversational Query Reformulation via Test-Time Adaptation (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion
17 Weiwei Sun 0001 43 3
45 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
44 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
18 Liwei Wang 0009 43 3
72 MVP-Tuning: Multi-View Knowledge Retrieval with Prompt Tuning for Commonsense Reasoning (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
47 Making Long-Context Language Models Better Multi-Hop Reasoners (2024) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
19 Yujia Zhou 0002 42 3
69 RetroLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Retrieve Fine-grained Evidence within Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
44 CorpusLM: Towards a Unified Language Model on Corpus for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2024) Generative Retrieval
20 Archiki Prasad 42 3
72 MeetingQA: Extractive Question-Answering on Meeting Transcripts (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
66 PRInTS: Reward Modeling for Long-Horizon Information Seeking (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision
21 Jiapu Wang 42 3
66 Large-Small Model Synergy with Multimodal Fine-Grained Heuristics for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (2025) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
59 Decomposing and Revising What Language Models Generate (2025) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
23 Qinggang Zhang 41 3
47 Knapsack Optimization-Based Schema Linking for LLM-Based Text-to-SQL Generation (2026) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
47 Cost-efficient Knowledge-based Question Answering with Large Language Models (2024) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
26 Shu Zhou 0002 41 3
73 LOSDF: A logical optimization and semantic decoupling framework for question answering in multi-party conversations (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval
61 Enhancing Extractive Question Answering in Multiparty Dialogues with Logical Inference Memory Network (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval
27 Xi Ye 0003 41 3
60 Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
47 Connecting Attributions and QA Model Behavior on Realistic Counterfactuals (2021) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA
28 Di Wu 0054 40 3
46 LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval
42 VisRet: Visualization Improves Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-Image Retrieval (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG
31 Qingyi Si 40 3
68 Multimodal Hypothetical Summary for Retrieval-based Multi-image Question Answering (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval
66 Combo of Thinking and Observing for Outside-Knowledge VQA (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
32 Yupeng Hou 40 3
53 Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation
45 CoRAL: Collaborative Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models Improve Long-tail Recommendation (2024) RAG for Domain Applications
33 Xingyu Tan 0001 40 3
43 PRoH: Dynamic Planning and Reasoning over Knowledge Hypergraphs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG
41 HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning
35 Corby Rosset 39 3
71 Axiomatic Preference Modeling for Longform Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
47 Transformer-XH: Multi-Evidence Reasoning with eXtra Hop Attention (2020) Multi-Hop and Iterative Retrieval Reasoning
36 Junjie Zhang 0009 39 3
53 Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation
38 STARec: An Efficient Agent Framework for Recommender Systems via Autonomous Deliberate Reasoning (2025) RL Training of Search Agents
37 Xinyu Ma 0001 39 3
45 Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion
45 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking