Wei Niu


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2025

pdf bib
Learning LLM Preference over Intra-Dialogue Pairs: A Framework for Utterance-level Understandings
Xuanqing Liu | Luyang Kong | Wei Niu | Afshin Khashei | Belinda Zeng | Steve Johnson | Jon Jay | Davor Golac | Matt Pope
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex dialogue tasks without requiring use case-specific fine-tuning. However, analyzing live dialogues in real-time necessitates low-latency processing systems, making it impractical to deploy models with billions of parameters due to latency constraints. As a result, practitioners often prefer smaller models with millions of parameters, trained on high-quality, human-annotated datasets. Yet, curating such datasets is both time-consuming and costly. Consequently, there is a growing need to combine the scalability of LLM-generated labels with the precision of human annotations, enabling fine-tuned smaller models to achieve both higher speed and accuracy comparable to larger models. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective framework to address this challenge. Our approach is specifically designed for per-utterance classification problems, which encompass tasks such as intent detection, dialogue state tracking, and more. To mitigate the impact of labeling errors from LLMs – the primary source of inaccuracies in student models – we propose a noise-reduced preference learning loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves accuracy across utterance-level dialogue tasks, including sentiment detection (over 2%), dialogue act classification (over 1.5%), etc.