Aligning LLMs through Multi-perspective User Preference Ranking-based Feedback for Programming Question Answering

Abstract

Code Community Question Answering (CCQA) seeks to tackle programming-related issues, thereby boosting productivity in both software engineering and academic research. Recent advancements in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have transformed the fine-tuning process of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce responses that closely mimic human behavior. Leveraging LLMs with RLHF for practical CCQA applications has thus emerged as a promising area of study. Unlike standard code question-answering tasks, CCQA involves multiple possible answers, with varying user preferences for each response. Additionally, code communities often show a preference for new APIs. These challenges prevent LLMs from generating responses that cater to the diverse preferences of users in CCQA tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Aligning LLMs through Multi-perspective User Preference Ranking-based Feedback for Programming Question Answering (ALMupQA) to create user-focused responses. Our approach starts with Multi-perspective Preference Ranking Alignment (MPRA), which synthesizes varied user preferences based on the characteristics of answers from code communities. We then introduce a Retrieval-augmented In-context Learning (RIL) module to mitigate the problem of outdated answers by retrieving responses to similar questions from a question bank. Due to the limited availability of high-quality, multi-answer CCQA datasets, we also developed a dataset named StaCCQA from real code communities. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the ALMupQA framework in terms of accuracy and user preference. Compared to the base model, ALMupQA showed nearly an 11% improvement in BLEU, with increases of 20% and 17.5% in BERTScore and CodeBERTScore, respectively.