Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering
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
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (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 |
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| 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 chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Jun Xu 0001 | 43 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Jun Xu 0001 assigned | 43 | 2 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 42 | 15 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 41 | 4 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 41 | 9 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 40 | 12 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 40 | 10 papers | |
| Kam-Fai Wong | 40 | 6 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |