We study how conditioning context shapes personalization behavior in a teacher-facing educational recommender system. We compare contextual conditioning based on the current student question with memory-based conditioning using persistent learner information. Using deviation correlation and paired statistical tests, we find that contextual recommendations exhibit stronger question-level responsiveness, while memory-based recommendations exhibit history-dependent behaviors, including learner-specific differentiation under identical input. Teacher-facing evaluation signals suggest these recommendations are interpretable and actionable. These results indicate that embedding-based similarity metrics capture responsiveness to the current question but do not characterize personalization grounded in learner history, motivating behavior-level diagnostics for studying conditioning effects.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Memory-based recommendation pipeline (learner-conditioned). The learner state functions as a persistent memory across interactions, retrieved at each step to guide pedagogical tactic selection prior to generation. The same generation mechanism is used across conditions; memory-based conditioning introduces memory retrieval and tactic selection.
Have the student justify their True/False choice using a claim–evidence–reasoning structure and rewrite the statement to make it testable.
Memory-based output
Clarify the purpose of the task and why evaluating claims about cognitive tasks matters in the course context; ask the student to restate the goal in their own words before proceeding.
Provide accuracy-based feedback relative to course mastery thresholds, identify the specific misconception in the response, and highlight concepts already mastered.
Table 2: Personalized recommendations under identical input. Memory-based outputs diverge across learners due to differences in persistent learner state, illustrating memory-based personalization beyond contextual conditioning.
Existing large language model (LLM) based memory systems apply universal, static policies that overlook a fundamental reality: the contexts that are worth storing in memory are different across users. This misalignment wastes limited memory budget on transient interactions while failing to preserve critical context for long horizon tasks. To address this gap, we investigate an underexplored question: can LLM based memory systems learn personalized memory policies? We introduce PerMemBench, the first benchmark for evaluating personalized memory systems, featuring multi year, multi domain interaction histories across diverse user personas. We further present the first empirical study of memory personalization, proposing session level storage gating, a lightweight framework that selectively bypasses memory operations for transient sessions. Our study confirms that personalization yields substantial retention gains under perfect gating, yet reveals that accurate gating remains an open and critical challenge.
Although users may express different personalization needs across tasks, these task-specific behaviors can reflect shared underlying preference mechanisms. Existing LLM personalization methods often focus on surface-level interactions or undifferentiated histories, overlooking the shared mechanisms underlying these behaviors. We introduce PersonaFactors, a framework that distills reusable and interpretable personalization factors from heterogeneous user interactions. We construct a library of thirteen PersonaFactors by extracting evidence-grounded rationales and clustering recurring patterns across tasks, and develop a dynamic factor-guided generation framework that selects factors relevant to each user's history and current request. Across four personalization benchmarks and four backbone models, Dynamic PersonaFactor achieves the best score on every reported metric. Representation analyses further show that PersonaFactors and user history induce partially overlapping low-dimensional representations, and that their joint use yields complementary shifts. Taken together, these findings suggest that factor-based and history-based personalization can mutually reinforce each other.
Hang Su, Zequn Liu, Jianghan Chao +3
East China Normal University · Beijing Zhongguancun Academy · Renmin University of China +1
Personalization in Question Answering (QA) requires answers that are both accurate and aligned with users' background, preferences, and historical context. Existing state-of-the-art methods primarily rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions that construct personal context by retrieving relevant items from the user's profile. Existing methods use the user's query directly to retrieve personal documents, and such strategies often lead to surface-level personalization. We propose PR2 (Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning), a reinforcement learning framework that integrates reasoning and retrieval from personal context for personalization. PR2 learns adaptive retrieval-reasoning policies, determining when to retrieve, what evidence to retrieve from user profiles, and how to incorporate it into intermediate reasoning steps. By optimizing multi-turn reasoning trajectories under a personalized reward function, the framework reinforces reasoning paths that better align with user-specific preferences and contextual signals reflected by the reward model. Extensive experiments on the LaMP-QA benchmark using three LLMs show that PR2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average relative improvement of 8.8%-12% in personalized QA.
Maryam Amirizaniani, Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani
University of Washington Seattle, WA, USA · University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, MA, USA