Comparison-based Active Preference Learning for Multi-dimensional Personalization

Minhyeon Oh, Seungjoon Lee, Jungseul Ok


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success, but aligning them with human preferences remains a core challenge. As individuals have their own, multi-dimensional preferences, recent studies have explored *multi-dimensional personalization*, which aims to enable models to generate responses personalized to *explicit* preferences. However, human preferences are often *implicit* and thus difficult to articulate, limiting the direct application of this approach. To bridge this gap, we propose Active Multi-dimensional Preference Learning (AMPLe), designed to capture implicit user preferences from interactively collected comparative feedback. Building on Bayesian inference, our work introduces a modified posterior update procedure to mitigate estimation bias and potential noise in comparisons. Also, inspired by generalized binary search, we employ an active query selection strategy to minimize the number of required comparisons by a user. Through theoretical analysis and experiments on language generation tasks, we demonstrate feedback efficiency and effectiveness of our framework in personalizing model responses. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ml-postech/AMPLe.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1590
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
33145–33166
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1590/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minhyeon Oh, Seungjoon Lee, and Jungseul Ok. 2025. Comparison-based Active Preference Learning for Multi-dimensional Personalization. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 33145–33166, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Comparison-based Active Preference Learning for Multi-dimensional Personalization (Oh et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1590.pdf