Dat Phan Trong
Author directory2026
LLM Feedback for Topic Model with Preference Optimization and Contrastive Learning
Tung Nguyen | Dat Phan Trong | Linh Ngo Van | Duc Anh Nguyen | Dinh Thai Hoang | Diep Nguyen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Tung Nguyen | Dat Phan Trong | Linh Ngo Van | Duc Anh Nguyen | Dinh Thai Hoang | Diep Nguyen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into topic modeling has shown promise for improving topic interpretability and coherence, particularly by exploiting the generative capabilities of LLMs through instruction-based prompting. However, existing methods often incur substantial computational cost and inference complexity. To address these limitations, we propose **LLMFeed**, a novel framework that leverages **feed**back from an **LLM** to improve topic model optimization. Specifically, the LLM is used to **evaluate** topic quality, **identify** semantic meaning, and **recommend** representative topic words. These signals are then incorporated to (i) refine topic representations via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and (ii) guide contrastive learning for improved document-topic assignments. Extensive experiments show that **LLMFeed** achieves a 7.6% gain in topic coherence and over 10% improvement in doc-topic distributions on 20 Newsgroups dataset, while requiring only minutes to run, compared with hours for recent LLM-integrated topic modeling methods.