arXiv AI

From Profiles to Steering Vectors: Global Sparse Priors and Local Semantic Calibration for Personalized Text Generation

The paper introduces GLASS, a training‑free framework that personalizes text generation by combining global user‑style priors extracted with sparse autoencoders and local contrastive style vectors built from clustered interaction scenarios. During inference, GLASS injects these global and local vectors into different model layers, achieving context‑aware personalization without retrieval or parameter updates. Experiments on LaMP and LongLaMP datasets demonstrate that GLASS surpasses retrieval, fine‑tuning, and other steering baselines on ROUGE metrics and LLM‑as‑judge evaluations, and its SAE‑based representations show robustness to topic and length shifts, indicating better disentanglement of style from content.

arXiv AI
Oct 15

Iterative Critique-Refine Framework for Enhancing LLM Personalization

The paper introduces PerFine, a training‑free critique‑refine framework that improves large language model personalization. In each iteration, a generator drafts text conditioned on a retrieved user profile, while a critic—also conditioned on the same profile—provides structured feedback on tone, vocabulary, sentence structure, and topicality. The generator revises the draft, and a knockout strategy selects the best version across iterations; additional inference‑time techniques such as Best‑of‑N and Topic Extraction further balance quality and efficiency. Experiments on Yelp, Goodreads, and Amazon datasets show PerFine consistently outperforms existing retrieval‑augmented methods like PGraphRAG, achieving G‑Eval gains of +8.5‑12% and steady improvements over 3‑5 refinement iterations.

By Durga Prasad Maram, Dhruvin Gandhi, Zonghai Yao, Gayathri Akkinapalli, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Wang, Ryan A. Rossi, Nesreen K. Ahmed
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Reasoning-Based Personalized Generation for Users with Sparse Data

arXiv:2602. 21219v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) personalization holds great promise for tailoring responses by leveraging personal context and history.

By Bo Ni, Branislav Kveton, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Leyao Wang, Franck Dernoncourt, Sungchul Kim, Seunghyun Yoon, Zichao Wang, Ruiyi Zhang, Puneet Mathur, Jihyung Kil, Jiuxiang Gu, Nedim Lipka, Yu Wang, Ryan A. Rossi, Tyler Derr
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Evaluating Style-Personalized Text Generation: Challenges and Directions

The paper "Evaluating Style-Personalized Text Generation: Challenges and Directions" examines the difficulties of assessing text that is tailored to individual users’ styles. It critiques common metrics such as BLEU, embeddings, and LLM-as-judges, and introduces a style discrimination benchmark covering domain discrimination, authorship attribution, and LLM-generated personalized versus non-personalized discrimination across eight writing tasks. The study finds that ensembles of diverse evaluation metrics outperform single-evaluator approaches and offers guidance for reliable assessment of style-personalized generation.

By Anubhav Jangra, Bahareh Sarrafzadeh, Silviu Cucerzan, Adrian de Wynter, Sujay Kumar Jauhar
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Syntax-Guided Diffusion Language Models with User-Integrated Personalization

The paper introduces a syntax-guided diffusion language model that incorporates structural supervision and personalized conditioning to improve text quality, diversity, and controllability. It presents a cascaded framework generating syntactic guidance before text generation, and a novel noncascaded architecture for better structure-content alignment. A shared representation mechanism enables fine‑grained personalization across users, achieving faithful stylistic generation and zero‑shot inference, with experiments showing superior fluency, diversity, and stylistic fidelity.

By Ruqian Zhang, Yijiao Zhang, Juan Shen, Zhongyi Zhu, Annie Qu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Disentangling Steering Vectors

arXiv:2609.07037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a lightweight, inference-time approach to control the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, traditional...

By Takeru Hiramatsu, Kyohei Atarashi, Koh Takeuchi, Hisashi Kashima
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Predicting Steering Vectors and Adapter Weights for Few-Shot Author-Style Transfer

The paper investigates how to adapt large language models to mimic an individual author's style using only a few example abstracts, a task made harder by the formal nature of scientific writing. It proposes three style‑conditioning methods—contrastive activation steering, a network predicting steering vectors, and a hypernetwork predicting LoRA adapters—and finds that while fine‑tuning captures the strongest style signal, it harms fluency; the hypernetwork offers the best balance between style imitation and output quality for both seen and unseen authors. The authors also show that steering can be performed at the author level by contrasting author abstracts against style‑neutral generations for the same content, eliminating the need for a predefined style inventory and outperforming inventory‑based approaches. whyItMatters":"The study provides practical techniques for author‑style transfer in scientific writing, revealing a trade‑off between style fidelity and fluency and demonstrating that hypernetworks can effectively balance these aspects."

By Leonard Popp, Danni Liu, Supriti Sinhamahapatra, Jan Niehues
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Sampling Reveals Style: Unsupervised, Training-Free Discovery of Prompt-Conditional Stylistic Axes in LLM Activations

The paper introduces a training‑free method for uncovering prompt‑conditional stylistic axes in large language models (LLMs). By repeatedly sampling completions of a single prompt at high temperature and applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to the pooled hidden activations, the authors automatically label the resulting axes using the extreme (pole) generations. Validation against 245 human‑elicited stylistic annotations shows that, for the Qwen‑3.5‑4B‑Instruct model, the top two axes align with human dimensions with 72.8% precision and 43.6% macro‑recall, and 75.6% of validity ratings confirm the axes’ polar generations, while other models exhibit varying degrees of discoverability.

By Ajit Mallavarapu, Ziwei Gu
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Can Activation Steering Capture Multidimensional Authorship Style?

The paper investigates whether activation steering can capture the complex, multidimensional nature of authorship style. By using structured contrastive prompting along rhetorically motivated dimensions, the authors construct rich style representations directly in activation space, revealing a shared authorship backbone with aspect‑specific residuals. They propose Aspect‑Aware Activation Steering (A3S), a training‑free framework that merges per‑aspect contrastive directions, employs interference‑aware aggregation, and tunes steering strength per instance, achieving better authorship style transfer and outperforming a trained baseline on out‑of‑domain benchmarks.

By Hieu Tran, Calvin Bao, Marine Carpuat