Learning What to Keep: Transfer-Aware Personal Skill Learning from User Feedback
Organizations: Beihang University · Chengdu University of Information Technology · Nanyang Technological University · Hangzhou International Innovation Institute ·
Abstract
User feedback enables LLMs to refine reusable personalized skills, but often mixes persistent preferences with request-specific corrections. Indiscriminately retaining both risks negative transfer, motivating selective retention at the level of individual requirements. We frame this challenge as selective transfer over atomic rules and propose SkillGrain, a framework for learning reusable personalized skills from user feedback. SkillGrain decomposes feedback into independently actionable rules, predicts their transferability, and retains only those suitable for future requests. To learn these decisions, we combine rubric-guided skill rewards with fine-grained credit assignment that separately evaluates rule content and retention decisions. We further jointly optimize skill induction and skill-conditioned generation through reinforcement learning, ensuring that learned skills support downstream personalization. We construct a benchmark spanning five personalized writing tasks to evaluate cross-request generalization. Experiments across three base models in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings show that SkillGrain achieves the best overall average performance among competing methods.
Figures & tables
| Methods | In-Domain | Out-of-Domain | Average | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Topic Writing | Yelp | Product Review | Abstract | |||
| Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct based | ||||||
| No Skill | 73.61 | 53.23 | 68.71 | 75.88 | 80.47 | 70.38 |
| No History | 71.76 | 72.96 | 81.57 | 71.06 | 75.91 | 74.65 |
| General Skill | 71.09 | 63.52 | 74.36 | 78.11 | 81.99 | 73.82 |
| Adaptive Skill | 71.97 | 52.59 | 70.10 | 79.15 | 82.45 | 71.25 |
| Backbone / Method | Topic | Yelp | Product | Abstract | Average | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct based | ||||||
| SkillGrain | 76.90 | 85.11 | 87.77 | 78.29 | 81.75 | 81.96 |
| w/ outcome-based reward | 76.75 | 82.94 | 86.24 | 76.84 | 82.12 | 80.99 |
| w/o atomization | 77.57 | 79.89 | 87.11 | 73.56 | 76.46 | 78.93 |
| w/o advantage allocation | 77.12 | 84.90 | 88.25 | 77.76 | 81.45 | 81.90 |
| w/o skill update | 77.61 | 78.74 | 84.77 | 75.31 | 80.16 | 79.33 |
| Method | Qwen2.5 3B-Instruct | Qwen3 1.7B | Qwen3 4B |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outcome-RL | 72.5 | 65.0 | 77.5 |
| Rule-RL | 80.0 | 72.5 | 77.5 |
| SkillGrain | 82.5 | 72.5 | 82.5 |
Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Task | Writing Scenario | Train | Test |
|---|---|---|---|
| Topic Writing | Generate a personalized post from a topic summary. | 498 | 200 |
| Continue an email from a given prefix in the user’s style. | 500 | 200 | |
| Yelp | Generate a personalized business review from metadata and a rating. | 500 | 200 |
| Product Review | Generate a personalized review from product information and a rating. | – | 198 |
| Abstract | Generate an author-style abstract from a title and keywords. | – | 200 |
| Total | 1,498 | 998 |
| Method | LEN | FP | EXPR | NL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct | ||||
| Outcome-RL | 71.29 | 86.95 | 68.24 | 92.94 |
| Rule-RL | 70.83 | 87.39 | 67.98 | 95.23 |
| SkillGrain | 74.62 | 88.05 | 68.85 | 96.35 |
| Qwen3-1.7B | ||||
| Outcome-RL | 80.47 | 88.16 | 70.22 | 92.70 |
| Extraction | Transferable | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backbone | ID | OOD | ID | OOD |
| Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct | 89.31 | 87.04 | 84.27 | 79.60 |
| Qwen3-1.7B | 82.63 | 77.71 | 86.24 | 81.41 |
| Qwen3-4B | 94.54 | 90.30 | 89.81 | 81.80 |
| Method | Judge Score |
|---|---|
| Outcome-RL | 73.44 |
| Rule-RL | 75.16 |
| SkillGrain | 76.44 |
| Method | Training Time (h) |
|---|---|
| SFT | 2.0 |
| STaR | 2.0 |
| Answer-Only RL | 0.9 |
| Outcome-RL | 2.1 |
| Rule-RL | 1.7 |
| SkillGrain (Ours) | 1.8 |
| Task | Round 1 | Round 2 | Test |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract | 0.905 | 1.000 | 1.000 |
| Topic Writing | 0.750 | 1.000 | 0.903 |
| Email Completion | 0.528 | 0.992 | 0.889 |
Personalized Language Models
Personalized language models adapt responses to individual users’ preferences, histories, writing styles, and changing needs.
See all 89 papers