Conversational Control with Ontologies for Large Language Models: A Lightweight Framework for Constrained Generation

Natural language remains the predominant way people interact with large language models (LLMs). However, users often struggle to precisely express and control subjective preferences (e.g., tone, style, and emphasis) through prompting. We propose Malleable Prompting, a new interactive prompting technique for controllable LLM generation. It reifies preference expressions in natural language prompts into GUI widgets (e.g., sliders, dropdowns, and toggles) that users can directly configure to steer generation, while visualizing each control's influence on the output to support attribution and comparison across iterations. To enable this interaction, we introduce an LLM decoding algorithm that modulates the token probability distribution during generation based on preference expressions and their widget values. Through a user study, we show that Malleable Prompting helps participants achieve target preferences more precisely and is perceived as more controllable and transparent than natural language prompting alone.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents, but reliable agentic behavior requires more than next-token prediction. At inference time, it is preferred that an agent can decide whether to proceed with its current reasoning, defer to a stronger model, request additional information, invoke external tools, or abstain under the given setup. Existing approaches address these decisions through prompt-level routing, external orchestration, or task-specific fine-tuning, which primarily rely on input-side signals, and are often costly and difficult to maintain as model backbones evolve. We ask whether such control decisions can be inferred directly from a model's latent generation process. We introduce Multi-Head Latent Control, a lightweight layer that reads hidden-state trajectories from a frozen LLM or VLM to produce deployment-time control signals. A Capability Head predicts whether the current model can solve the instance or should defer to a stronger collaborator, while a Resolution Head predicts appropriate resolution decision Clarification, Tool Use, Abstention, or Direct Answering. Both heads are trained only on latent traces from the same frozen LLM backbone, enabling post hoc adaptation without modifying the model. Across language and vision-language settings, Multi-Head Latent Control consistently improves the quality-cost tradeoff of multi-model systems, enabling early handoff from partial generations and more accurate intervention decisions. In routed execution (small + large model), it reduces large-model usage by up to 90.7 percent on AndroidWorld and 27-53 percent on average across benchmarks, while retaining most of large-model performance. Additionally, the learned control signals improve tool-use decision quality, yielding up to +158 percent relative score gain and 65.5 percent fewer missed-required tool calls.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical for enhancing LLMs' safety, helpfulness, humor, faithfulness, etc. Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) mainly focuses on a fixed reward learned from average human ratings, which may weaken the adaptability and controllability of varying preferences. However, creating personalized LLMs requires aligning LLMs with individual human preferences, which is non-trivial due to the scarce data per user and the diversity of user preferences in multi-objective trade-offs, varying from emphasizing empathy in certain contexts to demanding efficiency and precision in others. Can we train one LLM to produce personalized outputs across different user preferences on the Pareto front? In this paper, we introduce Multi-Objective Control (MOC), which trains a single LLM to directly generate responses in the preference-defined regions of the Pareto front. Our approach introduces multi-objective optimization (MOO) principles into RLHF to train an LLM as a preference-conditioned policy network. We improve the computational efficiency of MOC by applying MOO at the policy level, enabling us to fine-tune a 7B-parameter model on a single A6000 GPU. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of MOC over baselines in three aspects: (i) controllability of LLM outputs w.r.t. user preferences on the trade-off among multiple rewards; (ii) quality and diversity of LLM outputs, measured by the hyper-volume of multiple solutions achieved; and (iii) generalization to unseen preferences. These results highlight MOC's potential for real-world applications requiring scalable and customizable LLMs.