arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Beyond Retrieval: Learning Compact User Representations for Scalable LLM Personalization

The paper introduces TAP-PER, a prefix‑based framework that learns compact user representations for large language model personalization. By encoding user preferences into lightweight prefix embeddings and incorporating temporal signals, TAP‑PER avoids the need for heavy per‑user adapters or prompt‑serialized histories. Experiments on six LaMP tasks show that TAP‑PER outperforms both prompt‑based and model‑based baselines while using far fewer per‑user parameters, enabling scalable personalization at large user scales.

By Heng Cao, Fan Zhang, Jian Yao, Yujie Zheng, Changlin Zhao, Lu Hao, Yuxuan Wei, Wangze Ni, Huaiyu Fu, Yuqian Sun, Xuyan Mo
arXiv AI
3d ago

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 AI
Jul 23

Personalized Recommendation Tool Learning via Autonomous Language Agents

arXiv:2607. 19739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have recently gained traction in recommender systems due to their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, previous LLM-based agents suffer from hallucination and context-length limitations, and thus are not suitable for full-ranking recommendation tasks.

By Mingdai Yang, Zhiwei Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Yibo Wang, Hao Peng, Philip Yu
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

Personalized Recommendation Tool Learning via Autonomous Language Agents

Although large language models (LLMs) have recently gained traction in recommender systems due to their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, previous LLM-based agents suffer from hallucination and context-length limitations, and thus are not suitable for full-ranking recommendation tasks. To circumvent these limitations through architectural design rather than modifying the LLM itself, we propose an agent-based recommendation framework, memory-based $\textbf{P}$ersonalized $\textbf{R}$ecommendation $\textbf{T}$ool learning via autonomous language $\textbf{A}$gents (PRTA), in which an LLM acts as a central planner interacting with multiple recommendation models as tools.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

HyperTrace: Hypothesis-Based Preference Tracing for Online LLM Personalization

HyperTrace is a training‑free framework that personalizes large language models by tracing latent user preferences online. It maintains interpretable natural‑language hypotheses about short‑term intent and long‑term preferences, updating them with an SMC‑style reweighting process driven by an LLM‑based surrogate choice model. Experiments on PRISM and PersonaMem‑v2 demonstrate that HyperTrace improves response alignment, preference prediction, and profile consistency compared to strong online baselines.

By Jianzhi Shen, Keyu Mao, Minghao Shao, Chuanyang Jin, Yusong Wang, Ailiang Lin, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu Okumura, Tianmin Shu, Muhammad Shafique
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Bounded Personas Match Retrieval on Classification but Not Regression for a Frozen Agent

The paper introduces PersonaLink, a training‑free method that distills a user’s interaction history into a bounded three‑field persona and iteratively refines it by self‑evaluating a frozen 7B language model on held‑out labeled data. Each refinement rewrites the persona only if it does not regress on that slice, ensuring the persona remains bounded and query‑independent. On a 200‑user news categorization task (LaMP‑2), PersonaLink achieves 0.745–0.755 accuracy, statistically indistinguishable from BM25 retrieval’s 0.760–0.765 accuracy, demonstrating that distilled personas can match retrieval for classification but not for regression tasks.

By JaeHa Yoon, Minjun Park, Seoyeon Kim, Jiwoo Lee, Hyunwoo Choi, Dohyun Kang
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Safety as a Constraint: Fine-Tuning a LLM Recommender to Explain Itself

The paper presents a method for fine‑tuning a large language model (LLM) recommender to generate personalized, non‑harmful explanations for its recommendations. By training two LLM‑judge reward models and using constrained GRPO, the authors achieve a significant increase in the PASS rate for all three criteria, from 0.649 to 0.956 on their own judges and from 0.677 to 0.931 on an independent judge. The fine‑tuned model maintains its original recommendation performance, demonstrating that LLM‑based recommenders can be adapted to complex tasks without loss of effectiveness.

By Jiashu He, Emma Yanyang Kong, JJ Tan, David Fagnan
arXiv AI
Aug 18

QUMem: Personalized Memory for Query-Conditioned User-State Inference in LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 16168v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly use external memory systems to support personalization by drawing on long and evolving interaction histories, in which user preferences may be distributed across time, change with context, and conflict with earlier evidence.

By Heng Wang, Yifei Li, Lingling Zhang, Pengyu Li, Xinyu Che, Xinyu Zhang, Zesheng Yang