FSPO: Few-Shot Optimization of Synthetic Preferences Personalizes to Real Users

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Singh, Anikait, Hsu, Sheryl, Hsu, Kyle, Mitchell, Eric, Ermon, Stefano, Hashimoto, Tatsunori, Sharma, Archit, Finn, Chelsea
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Singh, Anikait
Hsu, Sheryl
Hsu, Kyle
Mitchell, Eric
Ermon, Stefano
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Sharma, Archit
Finn, Chelsea
author_facet Singh, Anikait
Hsu, Sheryl
Hsu, Kyle
Mitchell, Eric
Ermon, Stefano
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Sharma, Archit
Finn, Chelsea
contents Effective personalization of LLMs is critical for a broad range of user-interfacing applications such as virtual assistants and content curation. Inspired by the strong in-context capabilities of LLMs, we propose few-shot preference optimization (FSPO), an algorithm for LLM personalization that reframes reward modeling as a meta-learning problem. Under FSPO, an LLM learns to quickly infer a personalized reward function for a user via a few labeled preferences. FSPO also utilizes user description rationalization (RAT) to encourage better reward modeling and instruction following, recovering performance with the oracle user description. Since real-world preference data is challenging to collect at scale, we propose careful design choices to construct synthetic preference datasets for personalization, generating over 1M synthetic personalized preferences using publicly available LLMs. To successfully transfer from synthetic data to real users, we find it crucial for the data to exhibit both high diversity and coherent, self-consistent structure. We evaluate FSPO on personalized open-ended generation for up to 1,500 synthetic users across three domains: movie reviews, education, and open-ended question answering. We also run a controlled human study. Overall, FSPO achieves an 87% Alpaca Eval winrate in generating responses that are personalized to synthetic users and a 70% winrate with real human users in open-ended question answering.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19312
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FSPO: Few-Shot Optimization of Synthetic Preferences Personalizes to Real Users
Singh, Anikait
Hsu, Sheryl
Hsu, Kyle
Mitchell, Eric
Ermon, Stefano
Hashimoto, Tatsunori
Sharma, Archit
Finn, Chelsea
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Effective personalization of LLMs is critical for a broad range of user-interfacing applications such as virtual assistants and content curation. Inspired by the strong in-context capabilities of LLMs, we propose few-shot preference optimization (FSPO), an algorithm for LLM personalization that reframes reward modeling as a meta-learning problem. Under FSPO, an LLM learns to quickly infer a personalized reward function for a user via a few labeled preferences. FSPO also utilizes user description rationalization (RAT) to encourage better reward modeling and instruction following, recovering performance with the oracle user description. Since real-world preference data is challenging to collect at scale, we propose careful design choices to construct synthetic preference datasets for personalization, generating over 1M synthetic personalized preferences using publicly available LLMs. To successfully transfer from synthetic data to real users, we find it crucial for the data to exhibit both high diversity and coherent, self-consistent structure. We evaluate FSPO on personalized open-ended generation for up to 1,500 synthetic users across three domains: movie reviews, education, and open-ended question answering. We also run a controlled human study. Overall, FSPO achieves an 87% Alpaca Eval winrate in generating responses that are personalized to synthetic users and a 70% winrate with real human users in open-ended question answering.
title FSPO: Few-Shot Optimization of Synthetic Preferences Personalizes to Real Users
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19312