Personalized Alignment Revisited: The Necessity and Sufficiency of User Diversity

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Kang, Enoch Hyunwook
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Kang, Enoch Hyunwook
author_facet Kang, Enoch Hyunwook
contents Personalized alignment aims to adapt large language models to heterogeneous user preferences, yet the precise theoretical conditions for its statistical efficiency have not been formally established. This paper characterizes the conditions under which personalized alignment achieves O(1) online regret and log(1/epsilon) offline sample complexity. We show that these optimal rates depend on a specific user-diversity condition: the population of user-specific heads must span the latent reward directions that can alter the optimal response. We prove that this condition is both necessary and sufficient. When it holds, simple greedy algorithms achieve benchmark efficiency; when it fails, every learner in a natural admissible class incurs at least logarithmic regret. Our results identify user diversity as the fundamental driver of personalized identifiability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09119
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Personalized Alignment Revisited: The Necessity and Sufficiency of User Diversity
Kang, Enoch Hyunwook
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Personalized alignment aims to adapt large language models to heterogeneous user preferences, yet the precise theoretical conditions for its statistical efficiency have not been formally established. This paper characterizes the conditions under which personalized alignment achieves O(1) online regret and log(1/epsilon) offline sample complexity. We show that these optimal rates depend on a specific user-diversity condition: the population of user-specific heads must span the latent reward directions that can alter the optimal response. We prove that this condition is both necessary and sufficient. When it holds, simple greedy algorithms achieve benchmark efficiency; when it fails, every learner in a natural admissible class incurs at least logarithmic regret. Our results identify user diversity as the fundamental driver of personalized identifiability.
title Personalized Alignment Revisited: The Necessity and Sufficiency of User Diversity
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09119