arXiv Computation and Language

Optimizing Sparse Outcomes Through Dense Behavioral Signals via Value-Guided Preference Distillation

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 25

Beyond Surface Style: Aligning Multi-Turn User Simulators with Behavioral Consistency

The paper introduces TRACER, a multi‑turn user simulator that models evolving user intent and aligns simulated behavior with real interaction trajectories. TRACER is trained first with supervised fine‑tuning on real dialogues and then with reinforcement learning that uses hierarchical outcome‑ and trajectory‑level rewards to address reward sparsity and credit assignment. In real customer‑service sessions, TRACER‑7B outperforms the best baseline by 11.4 conversion F1, achieves the lowest group‑level conversion‑rate error and semantic trajectory distance, and generalizes to out‑of‑distribution scenarios, while human Turing tests show its conversations appear natural. The authors also present the Dynamic Marketing Benchmark, which evaluates both persuasion effectiveness and response quality of large language models through simulated interactions, demonstrating that higher response quality does not always lead to higher conversion rates.

By Geng Chen, Ruotong Pan, Zhirui Yang, Qiqi He, Jiawei Chen, Zhang Yunfei, Chongyuan Chen, Minxuan Lv, Zheng Yang, Win-Bin Huang, Xiangyu Wu, Wenwu Ou
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Unlocking Proactivity in Task-Oriented Dialogue

arXiv:2605. 22240v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Proactive task-oriented dialogue (TOD), such as outbound sales, demands a persuasive agent that actively probes the user's concerns and steers the conversation toward acceptance within a bounded number of turns.

By Azure Zhang, Ning Gao, Yuqin Dai, Ruiyuan Wu, Jinpeng Wang, Rena Wei Gao, Bingdong Tan, Shuzheng Gao, Zongjie Li, Chaozheng Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

UXBench Pro: Benchmarking Personalized User Experience in Multi-Turn Dialogue Interactions

UXBench Pro is a new benchmark that evaluates personalized user experience in multi-turn dialogue interactions. It contains 1,000 test instances from real user interactions across 12 task scenarios and 82 domains, each paired with a FACTORS user profile describing seven behavioral facets. The benchmark introduces a dual-perspective evaluation: a personalized User Reward Model for third‑person judgment and Sim4Eval, a user simulator for first‑person evaluation across four cognitive state dimensions, along with meta‑benchmarks URMBench and USimBench to assess evaluator reliability.

By Mengze Hong, Zeyang Lei, Wenbo Shang, Xia Zeng, Xiying Zhao, Qi Zhu, Chen Jason Zhang, Di Jiang, Taiming Fu, Qiongyi Zhou, Qinghe Chang, Fubao Zhang, Chenxuan Ma, Minlong Peng, Jinfeng Huang, Zineng Zhou, Jindou Wu, Muge Qi, Sijun He, Xin Cui, Di Liang, Yuan Hua, Davey Chen
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
Jul 31

Personalized RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models with Human Aligned Personalization

arXiv:2604. 07343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a critical frontier in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reward models (RMs) serving as a central mechanism for capturing diverse human values.

By Qiyao Ma, Dechen Gao, Rui Cai, Boqi Zhao, Hanchu Zhou, Junshan Zhang, Zhe Zhao
arXiv AI
Sep 16

MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning

MiCRo is a two‑stage framework that improves personalized preference learning for large language models. It first uses a context‑aware mixture model to capture diverse human preferences from large binary preference datasets, then applies an online routing strategy to dynamically adjust mixture weights based on context, reducing ambiguity. Experiments on multiple datasets show that MiCRo captures diverse preferences and enhances downstream personalization.

By Jingyan Shen, Jiarui Yao, Rui Yang, Yifan Sun, Feng Luo, Rui Pan, Tong Zhang, Han Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Controllable User Simulation

The paper formalizes controllable user simulation as a causal inference problem, showing that standard supervised fine‑tuning on post‑hoc trajectory labels introduces a look‑ahead bias that breaks causal consistency. This bias leads to a phenomenon called controllability collapse, where evaluation metric variance explodes under policy shift. The authors propose theoretical conditions for accurate simulation and practical training mitigations—such as a priori controls, step‑wise dynamic controls, and direct policy‑conditioned learning—to eliminate look‑ahead bias, preserve natural variance, and achieve robust zero‑shot generalization to unseen agent behaviors.

By Guy Tennenholtz, Ofer Meshi, Amir Globerson, Uri Shalit, Jihwan Jeong, Craig Boutilier