Papers for

product teams for conversational ai

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Personalized preference learning improves with unlabeled user responses

PerSPL: Personalized Semi-supervised Preference Learning

Abstract: Personalized reward models require user-specific preference comparisons, but collecting such feedback is costly and provides only limited supervision for each user. At the same time, large pools of responses can be generated without user identities or preference labels, yet existing personalized reward models leave this data unused. Directly learning from these responses is difficult because pairwise objectives constrain relative scores within a prompt, whereas pseudo-labeling individual responses requires scores that are comparable across prompts for the same user. We propose \textbf{PerSPL} (Personalized Semi-supervised Preference Learning), a backbone-agnostic framework that uses pair-mean score centering to stabilize this cross-prompt score coordinate and iteratively turns unlabeled responses into user-specific training signals. Against seven representative baselines across four benchmarks---PersonalLLM, HelpSteer2, Reddit TLDR, and Chatbot Arena---PerSPL achieves the highest reported mean accuracy among the evaluated methods for both seen and unseen users. The two latter benchmarks provide real-user preference comparisons in summarization and open-domain chatbot interaction, respectively. These results indicate that unlabeled responses can provide additional supervision for personalized reward modeling when per-user preference labels are scarce.

Wed 21 OctMachine Learning
The gist
Collecting user-specific preferences to train personalized AI models is often expensive and gives limited data for each person. The authors propose a new method called PerSPL that can learn from lots of unlabeled responses that don’t have user info or preference labels. PerSPL stabilizes the scores across different questions so it can generate usable training signals from unlabeled data. This approach improves accuracy in predicting user preferences in tasks like summarization and chatbot interaction, especially when labeled feedback is scarce.
Open → 2610.29219v1