Does Personalization Break Trust? Open-Set Rejection Calibration Under Few-Shot On-Device Intent Adaptation

Accurate evaluation of LLM personalization is hindered by current evaluation paradigms that over- or under-constrain the response space, yielding frequent false rejections and false acceptances. To reduce these false rates, we introduce ConQual-Audit, an audit-based framework that evaluates LLM personalization through a three-stage process: (1) extracting semantic constraints from user profiles and task-grounded reference; (2) qualifying constraints by pruning unnecessary constraints and recovering missing constraints; and (3) verifying candidate responses against the audited constraints via natural language inference. Across PrefEval and LaMP, ConQual-Audit outperforms nine baselines, attaining top AUCs (0.88 and 0.90) and the lowest false rate (0.21) on the leanest constraint sets at an amortizable audit cost. Crucially, this constraint audit is portable: integrating it into ExPerT and PREF helps revise smaller, higher-quality constraint sets to reduce their evaluation false rates.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to adapt to individual users, yet effective personalization remains challenging when only limited user-specific samples are available. In this work, we take an alternative perspective: pretrained LLMs may already possess latent capacity for personalization, and a few user samples may therefore suffice to guide the model toward user-aligned behavior with minimal user-specific adaptation. From this perspective, we propose LatentPersonal, a framework that formulates personalization as navigation in a shared latent adaptation space. LatentPersonal infers a compact latent representation from a few user samples to guide user-specific model adaptation, regularized with a variational information bottleneck to encourage compact preference representations. We instantiate LatentPersonal with LoRA, leveraging its low-rank parameterization as a natural low-dimensional adaptation space for personalization. By simply inserting a user-specific guidance vector between the shared low-rank factors, the model can navigate toward personalized adaptations through lightweight inference of this compact representation, without updating the shared LoRA parameters. Experiments across multiple personalization datasets demonstrate that LatentPersonal substantially reduces user-specific adaptation overhead while achieving effective personalization from only a few user-specific interactions, with particularly strong performance in the one-shot regime.

On-device large language models (LLMs'), e.g. running on mobile phones, are ripe for improvement via personalization. The limited compute resources of mobile devices impose limits on model scale and thus model quality, making any realizable quality gains highly impactful. At the same time, their personal nature (i.e., the close coupling to a particular user) means that a given on-device LLM tends to be used in similar, predictable patterns over the course of time. This paper presents a novel method for personalizing on-device LLMs. It trains a hypernetwork to map a user's context tokens to a low-rank adaptation (LoRA') well-suited to that user. Once the trained common artifacts are deployed to users' devices, each user uses the hypernetwork to synthesize (entirely on device) a personalized LoRA. This approach blends the benefits while avoiding the drawbacks of two existing approaches to LLM customization: in-context learning (ICL') and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT'). Like ICL (and unlike PEFT), the on-device phase of our approach is computationally feasible, requiring only forward passes through neural networks. Like PEFT (and unlike ICL), our approach modifies the `target' base LLM via weights (the LoRA), avoiding negative consequences (e.g. increased latency) associated with extending the input sequence. Our approach is particularly well-suited to the mobile device regime. Apart from the on-device compute and latency benefits mentioned, it also requires minimal additional storage, as internally its architecture partly leverages the same LLM weights as belong to the target LLM to be personalized. We demonstrate the benefits of LoRA-generating hypernetworks on several representative personalization datasets, comparing against baselines like ICL and PEFT. Of note, our personalization experiments focus on more challenging and less studied long-form text generation tasks.