PersonaLens: A Benchmark for Personalization Evaluation in Conversational AI Assistants

Zheng Zhao, Clara Vania, Subhradeep Kayal, Naila Khan, Shay B Cohen, Emine Yilmaz


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced conversational AI assistants. However, systematically evaluating how well these assistants apply personalization—adapting to individual user preferences while completing tasks—remains challenging. Existing personalization benchmarks focus on chit-chat, non-conversational tasks, or narrow domains, failing to capture the complexities of personalized task-oriented assistance. To address this, we introduce PersonaLens, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating personalization in task-oriented AI assistants. Our benchmark features diverse user profiles equipped with rich preferences and interaction histories, along with two specialized LLM-based agents: a user agent that engages in realistic task-oriented dialogues with AI assistants, and a judge agent that employs the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm to assess personalization, response quality, and task success. Through extensive experiments with current LLM assistants across diverse tasks, we reveal significant variability in their personalization capabilities, providing crucial insights for advancing conversational AI systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.927
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18023–18055
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.findings-acl.927/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.927
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zheng Zhao, Clara Vania, Subhradeep Kayal, Naila Khan, Shay B Cohen, and Emine Yilmaz. 2025. PersonaLens: A Benchmark for Personalization Evaluation in Conversational AI Assistants. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 18023–18055, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PersonaLens: A Benchmark for Personalization Evaluation in Conversational AI Assistants (Zhao et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.findings-acl.927.pdf