{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/towards-aligning-language-models-with-textual","title":"Towards Aligning Language Models with Textual Feedback","arxiv_id":"2407.16970","date":"2024-07-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Saüc Abadal Lloret","Shehzaad Dhuliawala","Keerthiram Murugesan","Mrinmaya Sachan"],"abstract":"We present ALT (ALignment with Textual feedback), an approach that aligns language models with user preferences expressed in text. We argue that text offers greater expressiveness, enabling users to provide richer feedback than simple comparative preferences and this richer feedback can lead to more efficient and effective alignment. ALT aligns the model by conditioning its generation on the textual feedback. Our method relies solely on language modeling techniques and requires minimal hyper-parameter tuning, though it still presents the main benefits of RL-based alignment algorithms and can effectively learn from textual feedback. We explore the efficacy and efficiency of textual feedback across different tasks such as toxicity reduction, summarization, and dialog response generation. We find that ALT outperforms PPO for the task of toxicity reduction while being able to match its performance on summarization with only 20% of the samples. We also explore how ALT can be used with feedback provided by an existing LLM where we explore an LLM providing constrained and unconstrained textual feedback. We also outline future directions to align models with natural language feedback.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16970v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.16970v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"towards-aligning-language-models-with-textual","repo_url":"https://github.com/sauc-abadal/alt","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"response-generation","task_name":"Response Generation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"align","method_name":"ALIGN"},{"method_slug":"entropy-regularization","method_name":"Entropy Regularization"},{"method_slug":"ppo","method_name":"PPO"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2407.16970","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2407.16970"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/sauc-abadal/alt","reach":null}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"a3c105fbdd8f274c","entry":"ALTTrainer_KL","repo":"sauc-abadal/alt","repo_kind":"official","path":"alt/trainer/alt_trainer.py","file_url":"https://github.com/sauc-abadal/alt/blob/HEAD/alt/trainer/alt_trainer.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"a3c105fbdd8f274c"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}