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:2609.15094v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In industrial recommendation feeds, presenting a static headline for an item often fails to satisfy the diverse, multimodal interests of the user pop...
By Yi Chen, Rufeng Cheng, Qiang Xie, Tao Li
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
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: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:2608. 09507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language user preferences provide an interpretable interface for LLM personalization.
By Yuting Liu, Wei Wu, Jianzhe Zhao, Guibing Guo
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
The paper introduces PerFine, a training‑free critique‑refine framework that improves large language model personalization. In each iteration, a generator drafts text conditioned on a retrieved user profile, while a critic—also conditioned on the same profile—provides structured feedback on tone, vocabulary, sentence structure, and topicality. The generator revises the draft, and a knockout strategy selects the best version across iterations; additional inference‑time techniques such as Best‑of‑N and Topic Extraction further balance quality and efficiency. Experiments on Yelp, Goodreads, and Amazon datasets show PerFine consistently outperforms existing retrieval‑augmented methods like PGraphRAG, achieving G‑Eval gains of +8.5‑12% and steady improvements over 3‑5 refinement iterations.
By Durga Prasad Maram, Dhruvin Gandhi, Zonghai Yao, Gayathri Akkinapalli, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Wang, Ryan A. Rossi, Nesreen K. Ahmed
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:2603.04191v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as personal assistants, where users may share individual preferences over extended interactio...
By Qianyun Guo, Yibo Li, Yue Liu, Bryan Hooi
Personalized reward models require user-specific preference comparisons, but collecting such feedback is costly and provides only limited supervision for each user. At the same time, large pools of re...
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