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Personalize Your LLM: Fake it then Align it (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Mar 17, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The system has the model invent examples of what a user likes, then nudges its inner style toward them, personalizing without retraining per person or a big user history. Across two model architectures it beat two standard personalization baselines by an average of 40%.

Abstract

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) is essential for delivering tailored interactions that improve user experience. Many existing personalization methods require fine-tuning LLMs for each user, rendering them prohibitively expensive for widespread adoption. Although retrieval-based approaches offer a more compute-efficient alternative, they still depend on large, high-quality datasets that are not consistently available for all users. To address this challenge, we propose CHAMELEON, a scalable and efficient personalization approach that uses (1) self-generated personal preference data and (2) representation editing to enable quick and cost-effective personalization. Our experiments on various tasks, including those from the LaMP personalization benchmark, show that CHAMELEON efficiently adapts models to personal preferences, improving instruction-tuned models and outperforms two personalization baselines by an average of 40% across two model architectures.

Yijing Zhang, Dyah Adila, Changho Shin, Frederic Sala
arXiv:2503.01048 · cs.LG · submitted Mar 2, 2025 · updated Mar 5, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · NAACL 2025 Findings

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