arXiv AI

Cautious Context Steering for Language Model Personalization

arXiv:2608. 05813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalizing language models (LMs) to individual user preferences is essential for aligning responses with diverse goals and backgrounds.

arXiv AI
Sep 24

COPE: Continual Personalization of LLMs under Sparse User Feedback via User Embeddings and Self-Evaluation

COPE (Continual Optimization with Personalized embedding and self-Evaluation) is a new framework that continually personalizes large language models using learnable user embeddings and self‑evaluation to generate proxy rewards. It integrates preference capture, self‑evaluation calibration, and personalized response optimization into a single update step, allowing continuous model updates even when explicit user feedback is sparse. Experiments demonstrate that COPE outperforms both training‑free and training‑based baselines, remains complementary to Retrieval‑Augmented Prompting, and shows reliable self‑evaluation, meaningful preference patterns, stable general capabilities, and robustness to shifting preferences and alternative evaluators.

By Ruike Cao, Fugen Yao, Liang Dong, Jian Xu, Guanjun Jiang, Li Xiao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Retrieval-augmented Decoding for Improving Truthfulness in Open-ended Generation

The paper introduces Retrieval-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a decoding-time method that improves the truthfulness of large language models without retraining. RAD uses a small reference set of up to ten annotated examples to build a grounding space of context embeddings and next-token logits, which it retrieves and aggregates during inference to shape the model’s output. Experiments on four open-ended generation benchmarks and four different LLMs show that RAD consistently outperforms strong baselines and generalizes well across tasks.

By Manh Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Hung Le
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Synthetic Interaction Data for Scalable Personalization in Large Language Models

arXiv:2602. 12394v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Personalized prompting offers large opportunities for deploying large language models (LLMs) to diverse users, yet existing prompt optimization methods primarily focus on task-level optimization while largely overlooking user-specific preferences and latent constraints of individual users.

By Yuchen Ma, Yue Huang, Wenjie Wang, Xiaonan Luo, Xiangliang Zhang, Stefan Feuerriegel
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Less Is Personal: Learning Minimal Sufficient User Profiles for Personalized Language Models

The paper introduces ENOUGH, a method for creating minimal sufficient user profiles for personalized language models. ENOUGH iteratively adds behavioral records or stops, evaluating profile prefixes with a counterfactual search that balances downstream gains, user specificity, and token costs. The resulting profiles are distilled into a lightweight controller that orders records and triggers the generator only once, achieving better effectiveness and efficiency than existing baselines across six tasks.

By Minghang Liu, Qiang Qiu, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Learning to summarize user information for personalized reinforcement learning from human feedback

The paper introduces PLUS, a framework that uses reinforcement learning to generate text-based summaries of individual users’ preferences, characteristics, and past conversations. These summaries condition a reward model, allowing it to predict personalized response preferences and improving reward accuracy by 11–77 % over the standard Bradley‑Terry model. PLUS demonstrates robust performance with new users and topics, achieves a 25 % improvement over existing personalized RLHF techniques, and enables zero‑shot personalization for state‑of‑the‑art models like GPT‑4.

By Hyunji Nam, Yanming Wan, Mickel Liu, Peter Ahnn, Jianxun Lian, Natasha Jaques
arXiv AI
Sep 7

PLUME: Parameter-Efficient Personalization of Large Language Models via Low-Rank User Modulation in Shared Subspaces

PLUME is a lightweight framework for personalizing large language models by learning a shared task-specific subspace from aggregated user data and then training only a small square matrix for each user within that subspace. The approach introduces cross-layer shared parameters and rank‑1 residual terms to reduce redundancy while preserving expressiveness. Experiments on personalized text generation benchmarks show that PLUME matches or outperforms strong baselines while cutting per‑user parameters by over 95%.

By Xinyu Li, Hao Zhou, Jianfeng Zhu, Julina Maharjan, Ruixin Guo, Feodor Dragan, Ruoming Jin