Papers by Davide Mazzaccara
Learning to Ask Informative Questions: Enhancing LLMs with Preference Optimization and Expected Information Gain (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often perform poorly in generating informative questions, as measured by expected information gain (EIG). |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large language model to enhance the informativeness of LLM-generated questions in 20-question game dialogues by applying a Direct Preference Optimization algorithm to generate low-EIG and high-EI questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces more effective questions even in domains different from those used to train the DPO model. |
Playpen: An Environment for Exploring Learning From Dialogue Game Feedback (2025.emnlp-main)
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Nicola Horst, Davide Mazzaccara, Antonia Schmidt, Michael Sullivan, Filippo Momentè, Luca Franceschetti, Philipp Sadler, Sherzod Hakimov, Alberto Testoni, Raffaella Bernardi, Raquel Fernández, Alexander Koller, Oliver Lemon, David Schlangen, Mario Giulianelli, Alessandro Suglia
| Challenge: | In this paper, we investigate whether Dialogue Games—goal-directed and rule-governed activities driven predominantly by verbal actions—can also serve as a source of feedback signals for learning. |
| Approach: | They introduce Playpen, an environment for off- and online learning through Dialogue Game self-play, and investigate a representative set of post-training methods: supervised fine-tuning, direct alignment and reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on unseen instances, but negatively impacts other skills, while interactive learning shows balanced improvements without loss of skills. |