PerSPL (Personalized Semi-supervised Preference Learning) is a backbone‑agnostic framework that stabilizes cross‑prompt score coordinates using pair‑mean score centering, enabling the conversion of unlabeled responses into user‑specific training signals. It addresses the scarcity of user‑specific preference comparisons by leveraging large pools of unlabeled responses, which are otherwise unused by existing personalized reward models. Across four benchmarks—PersonalLLM, HelpSteer2, Reddit TLDR, and Chatbot Arena—PerSPL achieves the highest mean accuracy for both seen and unseen users, demonstrating its effectiveness in summarization and open‑domain chatbot interaction settings.
By Xiaoan Xu, Tingzhou Wei, Juncheng Dong, Korel Gundem, Ethan X. Fang, Zhengling Qi
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
The paper investigates whether using a language model’s memory to personalize responses aligns with user preferences. By collecting about 1,000 pairwise judgments from 87 participants on ChatGPT queries that included personal memories, the authors find that memory‑conditioned responses are not consistently preferred and that users sometimes strongly favor non‑memory responses. An automatic reward model trained on these judgments achieves 72.8% preference prediction accuracy and outperforms existing baselines, highlighting the need for evaluation and optimization objectives that better reflect user preferences for memory use.
By Yijiang River Dong, Zexue He, Cheng Yu, Tiancheng Hu, Michael J Ryan, Jan Batzner, Zheng Hui, Shaolong Wu, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Alex Pentland, Nigel Collier, Jiaxin Pei
arXiv:2606. 06614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite growing interest, most evaluations of large language models' (LLMs') personalization abilities have relied on synthetic data.
By Lechen Zhang, Jiarui Liu, Tal August
arXiv:2509. 22851v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Margin-based optimization is fundamental to improving generalization and robustness in classification tasks.
By Yaswanth Chittepu, Prasann Singhal, Greg Durrett, Scott Niekum
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:2504.20106v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) are both helpful and harmless is a critical challenge, as overly strict constraints can lead to excessiv...
By Ren-Wei Liang, Chin-Ting Hsu, Chan-Hung Yu, Saransh Agrawal, Shih-Cheng Huang, Chieh-Yen Lin, Shang-Tse Chen, Kuan-Hao Huang, Shao-Hua Sun
arXiv:2509. 24696v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to individual user preferences is a critical step beyond generating generically helpful responses.
By Zikun Qu, Min Zhang, Mingze Kong, Xiang Li, Zhiwei Shang, Zhiyong Wang, Yikun Ban, Shuang Qiu, Yao Shu, Zhongxiang Dai
Large Language Models (LLMs) as judges across various scenarios such as assessing model responses is becoming an increasingly accepted paradigm. However, existing judgment approaches often rely on trained judgers using fixed preference data, which tend to overlook diverse user preferences and struggle to adapt to real-world human-AI dialogue scenarios.
The paper introduces Collaborative Reward Modeling (CRM), an online framework that uses cross-model peer review and curriculum learning to identify reliable preference pairs for training reward models (RMs). By having two RMs evaluate each other's sample selections and synchronizing their learning progress, CRM reduces the impact of noisy feedback, improving RM generalization by up to 9.94 points on RewardBench under 40% preference noise. The approach also extends to implicit-reward alignment, demonstrating robustness and broad applicability for learning from imperfect feedback.
By Jiazheng Zhang, Wenqing Jing, Zizhuo Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Rongxiang Weng, Jiahuan Li, Jingang Wang, Mingxu Chai, Shibo Hong, Yuming Yang, Chenhao Huang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
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:2510.17881v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned with population-level preferences, despite substantial variation across individual users. We int...
By Yizhuo Chen, Xin Liu, Ruijie Wang, Zheng Li, Pei Chen, Changlong Yu, Qingyu Yin, Priyanka Nigam, Meng Jiang, Bing Yin