Make The Most of Prior Data: A Solution for Interactive Text Summarization with Preference Feedback

Abstract: For summarization, human preference is critical to tame outputs of the summarizer in favor of human interests, as ground-truth summaries are scarce and ambiguous. Practical settings require dynamic exchanges between human and AI agent wherein feedback is provided in an online manner, a few at a time. In this paper, we introduce a new framework to train summarization models with preference feedback interactively. By properly leveraging offline data and a novel reward model, we improve the performance regarding ROUGE scores and sample-efficiency. Our experiments on three various datasets confirm the benefit of the proposed framework in active, few-shot and online settings of preference learning.