Overview

User preference modeling studies how to infer and represent people’s priorities from choices, interaction histories, ratings, and direct feedback so systems can make more relevant recommendations and decisions. Common approaches include choice and reward models, latent factors and user profiles, Bayesian questioning, and language-model memory; recommendation systems also use temporal models to track changing interests. A central challenge is separating stable preferences from short-term intent while learning from sparse, noisy, or biased behavior, often using online feedback or shared patterns across users. Benchmarks increasingly test whether systems update preferences over long interactions and apply them only in the right context, where reliable inference does not yet guarantee appropriate action.

Latest papers

CardsList

271 papers42 papers in the last four weeks, up 45% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Modeling Preference Dependencies with Directed Acyclic Graphs for Narrative-Driven Recommendation

    Oct 27, 2026Mingzhe Lu, Jian Qin, Ruize Qin +3Recommender SystemsPreference Modeling

  2. BehaviorMem: Building and Evaluating User Memory from Real-World E-Commerce Behavior Streams

    Oct 26, 2026Sizhe Wang, Xinghao Fang, Rui Qiu +4Agent MemoryMemory Agent Benchmarks

  3. Jev-DLC: Decision-Level Continual Learning from Typed Feedback

    Oct 22, 2026Yangyang Feng, Jianle Gan, Zhuoyan Feng +1User Preference Modeling

  4. Memory-Aware Reward Modeling: Learning Human Preferences for LLM Memory Use

    Oct 22, 2026Yijiang River Dong, Zexue He, Cheng Yu +9Memory-Augmented Language ModelsReward Modeling

  5. Abstract Priorities, Concrete Rewards: How Stated Preferences Relate to What People Reward in AI Responses

    Oct 22, 2026Zihan Chen, Lei Nico Zheng, Di ZhuUser Preference ModelingPreference Elicitation

  6. Diagnosing Personalization Failures in Mobile GUI Agents

    Oct 22, 2026Zhixin Lin, Dongliang Xu, Jungang Li +6GUI AgentsMobile GUI Agents

  7. Why Bother Me Again? Benchmarking Personal Agent Memory for Interaction Preferences

    Oct 21, 2026Jialin Li, Zhenhao Chen, Hanjun Luo +1Memory Agent BenchmarksPersonal AI Agents

  8. PerSPL: Personalized Semi-supervised Preference Learning

    Oct 21, 2026Xiaoan Xu, Tingzhou Wei, Juncheng Dong +3Personalized Reward ModelingUser Preference Modeling

  9. Steerable Pluralistic Policy Alignment from Anonymized Crowd Feedback

    Oct 17, 2026Akansha Kalra, Ellen R. Novoseller, Vernon J. Lawhern +1Pluralistic AlignmentUser Preference Modeling

  10. Bridging Exploration and Persona: Information-Directed Dueling for Test-Time Agent Personalization

    Oct 17, 2026Jie Mao, Pingchen Lu, Xiangyi Wang +4LLM PersonalizationUser Preference Modeling

  11. Candidate-dependent residual routing trades top-of-list accuracy for recall in sequential recommendation

    Oct 16, 2026Han Chen, Yingrui LiSequential RecommendationAttention Routing

  12. Agentic-Priors: Using Large Language Models to Address the Cold Start Problem in Preference Elicitation

    Oct 15, 2026Bruno Arcanjo, Zhaoxing Li, Sebastian SteinPreference ElicitationUser Preference Modeling

  13. Online LLM Personalization from Pairwise Preferences Across Users

    Oct 12, 2026Romain Puech, Georgy Salakhutdinov, Dimitris BertsimasEducational QALLM Personalization

  14. Boosting the Learning for Ranking Patterns

    Oct 12, 2026Nassim Belmecheri, Noureddine Aribi, Nadjib Lazaar +2Learning to RankUser Preference Modeling

  15. PersonaFactor: Preference Factors with Dynamic Selection for LLM Personalization

    Oct 12, 2026Hang Su, Zequn Liu, Jianghan Chao +3LLM PersonalizationUser Preference Modeling

  16. Vision: "What Don't I Know About User's Preferences?" How Uncertainty Estimation Improves Proactive Assistant Alignment

    Oct 11, 2026Zhiyu An, Ziyi Xuan, Yu Yang +1Proactive AgentsUser Preference Modeling

  17. DRanker: A Transformer-Based Multi-Task Ranking Model for the Disney+ Homepage

    Oct 11, 2026Priya Nirmal Singh Khokher, Daniel Nemirovsky, Benjamin P. Whitesell +4Recommender SystemsLearning to Rank

  18. UNISON: A Unified Framework for Learning from Scored Bags

    Oct 11, 2026Ofek Kirshenboim, Or Shkuri, Shani Finkelshtein +1Multiple Instance LearningRecommender Systems

  19. PAG-Agent: Zero-Shot Personalized Music Album Generation via Aesthetic Profile Distillation

    Oct 10, 2026Yifeng Mao, Ziye Wang, Yutong Shen +2Music GenerationUser Preference Modeling

  20. Personalization Matters: Long-Horizon Conversation Agent with User-Centric Information in Online Shopping Interactions

    Oct 8, 2026Rena Gao, Yue Dai, Hao Guan +4Agentic CommerceRecommender Systems

  21. Personalize at Test Time: Learning User Preferences for Image Generation

    Oct 6, 2026Jiamu Bai, Jiaming Hu, Yanhong Wu +1User Preference ModelingDiffusion Model Alignment

  22. MoF: Preference-Aware Mixture Modeling for Black-Box LLM Personalization

    Oct 6, 2026Hun ParkLLM PersonalizationPersonalized Language Models