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FaST: Feature-aware Sampling and Tuning for Personalized Preference Alignment with Limited Data

Aug 2025 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · pp. 9341-9370 · 5 citations · 48 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

This work focuses on a practical yet challenging setting where only a small set of preference annotations can be collected per user, and proposes FaST, a highly parameter-efficient approach that leverages high-level features automatically discovered from the data, achieving the best overall performance.

Abstract

LLM-powered conversational assistants are often deployed in a one-size-fits-all manner, which fails to accommodate individual user preferences. Recently, LLM personalization -- tailoring models to align with specific user preferences -- has gained increasing attention as a way to bridge this gap. In this work, we specifically focus on a practical yet challenging setting where only a small set of preference annotations can be collected per user -- a problem we define as Personalized Preference Alignment with Limited Data (PPALLI). To support research in this area, we introduce two datasets -- DnD and ELIP -- and benchmark a variety of alignment techniques on them. We further propose FaST, a highly parameter-efficient approach that leverages high-level features automatically discovered from the data, achieving the best overall performance.

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