PersonalLLM: Tailoring LLMs to Individual Preferences

Thomas P Zollo, Andrew Wei Tung Siah, Naimeng Ye, Ang Li, Hongseok Namkoong

Keywords: Personalization, LLM, Alignment, benchmark, dataset, reinforcement learning from human feedback, language models, RLHF, preferences

TL;DR: A public benchmark and dataset focused on adapting LLMs to provide maximal benefits for a particular user.

Abstract: As LLMs become capable of complex tasks, there is growing potential for personalized interactions tailored to the subtle and idiosyncratic preferences of the user. We present a public benchmark, PersonalLLM, focusing on adapting LLMs to provide maximal benefits for a particular user. Departing from existing alignment benchmarks that implicitly assume uniform preferences, we curate open-ended prompts paired with many high-quality answers over which users would be expected to display heterogeneous latent preferences. Instead of persona prompting LLMs based on high-level attributes (e.g., user race or response length), which yields homogeneous preferences relative to humans, we develop a method that can simulate a large user base with diverse preferences from a set of pre-trained reward models. Our dataset and generated personalities offer an innovative testbed for developing personalization algorithms that grapple with continual data sparsity---few relevant feedback from the particular user---by leveraging historical data from other (similar) users. We explore basic in-context learning and meta-learning baselines to illustrate the utility of PersonalLLM and highlight the need for future methodological development.

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

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Submission Number: 4473