Large language models (LLMs) often shift their outputs in response to implicit demographic cues even when users never state a demographic identity. Previous work has documented this behavior, but the connection between these behavioral changes and the model's internal activations remains unclear.
The paper examines how large language models (LLMs) respond to different demographic cues—such as names—when users seek advice, focusing on race and gender in a U.S. context. It finds that using different cues for the same group leads to only partially overlapping changes in model responses, producing inconsistent conclusions about personalization and unstable bias metrics. The authors argue that LLMs react to linguistic signals tied to cues rather than to stable demographic categories, and they call for evaluations that use multiple cues and consider underlying mechanisms.
By Manuel Tonneau, Neil K. R. Sehgal, Niyati Malhotra, Sharif Kazemi, Victor Orozco-Olvera, Ana Mar\'ia Mu\~noz Boudet, Lakshmi Subramanian, Samuel P. Fraiberger, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Valentin Hofmann
arXiv:2608.28833v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While Large language models (LLMs) incorporate user personalization signals to improve usability and helpfulness, they increasingly shift from providin...
By Yumeng Wang, Yuchen Wu, Cheng Qian, Zhiyuan Fan, Hyeonjeong Ha, Shujin Wu, Jiayu Liu, Heng Ji, Ge Wang
arXiv:2604. 01925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models increasingly suppress biased outputs when demographic identity is stated explicitly, yet may still exhibit implicit biases when identity is conveyed indirectly.
By Bhaskara Hanuma Vedula, Darshan Anghan, Ishita Goyal, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Abhijnan Chakraborty
arXiv:2609.16993v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Language Models are now common in student assessment, but we know little about how student demographics affect their use. Sometimes, considerin...
By Donya Rooein, Luca Benedetto, Dirk Hovy
arXiv:2609.22112v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate user-specific text with high stylistic fidelity. However, the personal data that...
By Muhammed Nazmul Arefin, Omar Jamal Hammad
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
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:2608. 12389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-domain zero- or few-shot personalization aims to generate user-preferred responses in unseen conversational domains from only a handful of target-domain interactions.
By Xuefei Wang, Jun Han, Zixuan Wang, Qingkai Zeng, Xiao Wang, Ruijie Wang, Jianxin Li
The paper introduces a bias depth score to differentiate between stable model preferences (Deep biases) and prompt‑dependent responses (Shallow biases) in large language models. By analyzing 4,442 opinion prompts across four models, it finds that only about a quarter of concentrated preferences persist after scenario reframing, indicating that most are shallow. The study shows Deep biases are more often inherited from pretraining and harder to remove through fine‑tuning or prompt‑based debiasing, highlighting the need to distinguish learned biases from prompt artifacts.
By An Vo, Vy Tuong Dang, Khai-Nguyen Nguyen, Emilio Villa-Cueva, Thamar Solorio, Anh Totti Nguyen, Daeyoung Kim
Personalized language-model assistants are often evaluated through a memory lens: can a model recall preferences users have explicitly stated in dialogue? More comprehensive personalization demands a harder capability -- inferring what users care about from the multimodal traces they naturally leave behind.
arXiv:2511. 06148v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are adopted into frameworks that grant them the capacity to make real decisions, it is increasingly important to ensure that they are unbiased.
By Addison J. Wu, Ryan Liu, Xuechunzi Bai, Thomas L. Griffiths