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Cheng Qian

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#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Evaluating the Hidden Costs of Personalization in Large Language Models

While Large language models (LLMs) incorporate user personalization signals to improve usability and helpfulness, they increasingly shift from providing balanced, informative responses toward optimizing for user satisfaction when conditioned on personal context such as conversation history, inferred preferences, and user profiles. Specifically, we identify three emerging risks: (1) irrelevant personalization, where models reference personal information in unnecessary contexts; (2) preference narrowing, where models reinforce informational echo chambers; and (3) sycophantic bias, where models agree excessively with user opinions. As a result, models may reference personal information in contexts where it is unnecessary, inadvertently collapse response diversity, or agree excessively with user opinions. Despite the growing use of personalization in AI assistants, there has been limited systematic evaluation of its potential side effects. To bridge this gap, we propose PRISK, a dynamic evaluation framework with automated data generation and tailored metrics that uncovers systematic limitations in current LLM personalization and how personalized information shapes its responses. Our empirical analysis across 13 LLMs demonstrates the presence of user profiles and retrieved memories consistently exacerbates biases, resulting in an average drop of 45.9% in irrelevant personalization, 41.7% in preference narrowing and 61.7% in sycophantic bias.

Yumeng Wang, Yu-Chen Wu, Cheng Qian et al. · 0 citations
Review Aug 2026

Co-Evolution in Agentic Systems: Toward Self-Directed Evolution Beyond Human Design

Agentic systems are increasingly expected to improve after deployment, yet single-entity self-evolution is often bounded by a static learning context, such as fixed tasks and feedback. This survey focuses on co-evolution in agentic systems, a multi-component form of self-evolution in which multiple agents and their environment impose adaptive pressure on one another. To organize existing papers, we propose a progressive three-stage taxonomy that traces how the system gradually sheds human-engineered constraints. Agent--Agent Co-Evolution studies how agents adapt through dynamic peers, including adversarial, collaborative, and organizational adaptation. Agent--Environment Co-Evolution extends this loop to adaptive tasks, feedback, and interaction spaces that change with the agents. Meta Co-Evolution further explores the possibility of making the evolution mechanism itself evolvable. We also discuss open challenges in evaluating such systems, scaling them across multiple components, and keeping increasingly autonomous evolutionary processes safe and controllable. This survey provides a unified foundation for building robust and open-ended agentic systems that can improve beyond fixed human-designed paths.

Qing Zong, Jiayu Liu, Junhao Shen et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

Teaching LLMs to Self-Evolve: Cultivating Core Meta-Skills with Reinforcement Learning

MetaEvolve is presented, a framework designed to develop meta-skills that can transfer broadly to open-ended problems where such rich training signals are scarce, and aims to inspire generalizable domain-agnostic meta-skills that can transfer broadly to open-ended problems where such rich training signals are scarce.

Shujin Wu, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen et al. · 0 citations