arXiv Computation and Language

POPI: Personalizing LLMs via Optimized Natural Language Preference Inference

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 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
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 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
arXiv AI
1d 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 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 AI
Aug 18

Ask to Be Sure: Informative Interactions for Confident Multi-Turn LLM Recommendation

arXiv:2608. 15949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use as conversational recommender systems (CRS), demonstrating strong recommendation accuracy and natural dialogue.

By Cedar Site Bai, Duanshun Li, Zhenyu Liao, Sheikh Sarwar, Huiyuan Chen, Yuan Chen, Changhe Yuan, Haiyang Zhang, Qilin Qi