Mengyang Ma
2026
MTA:A Merge-then-Adapt Framework for Personalized Large Language Models
Xiaopeng Li | Yuanjin Zheng | Wanyu Wang | Wenlin Zhang | Pengyue Jia | Yingyi Zhang | Haiying He | Mengyang Ma | Yiqi Wang | Maolin Wang | Xuetao Wei | Xiangyu Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xiaopeng Li | Yuanjin Zheng | Wanyu Wang | Wenlin Zhang | Pengyue Jia | Yingyi Zhang | Haiying He | Mengyang Ma | Yiqi Wang | Maolin Wang | Xuetao Wei | Xiangyu Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to align model outputs with individual user preferences, a crucial capability for user-centric applications. However, the prevalent approach of fine-tuning a separate module for each user faces two major limitations: (1) storage costs scale linearly with the number of users, rendering the method unscalable; and (2) fine-tuning a static model from scratch often yields suboptimal performance for users with sparse data. To address these challenges, we propose MTA, a Merge-then-Adapt framework for PLLMs. MTA comprises three key stages. First, we construct a shared Meta-LoRA Bank by selecting anchor users and pre-training meta-personalization traits within meta-LoRA modules. Second, to ensure scalability and enable dynamic personalization combination beyond static models, we introduce an Adaptive LoRA Fusion stage. This stage retrieves and dynamically merges the most relevant anchor meta-LoRAs to synthesize a user-specific one, thereby eliminating the need for user-specific storage and supporting more flexible personalization. Third, we propose a LoRA Stacking for Few-Shot Personalization stage, which applies an additional ultra-low-rank, lightweight LoRA module on top of the merged LoRA. Fine-tuning this module enables effective personalization under few-shot settings. Extensive experiments on the LaMP benchmark demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing SOTA methods across multiple tasks. Our code is also available.