# Pearl: Personalizing Large Language Model Writing Assistants with Generation-Calibrated Retrievers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09180/

## Key facts

- Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10511/) (2022)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08633/) (2021)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [Making Retrieval-Augmented Language Models Robust to Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01558/) (2023)
- [Selection-Inference: Exploiting Large Language Models for Interpretable Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09712/) (2022)
- [Trusting Your Evidence: Hallucinate Less with Context-aware Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14739/) (2023)
- [Demonstrate-Search-Predict: Composing retrieval and language models for knowledge-intensive NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.14024/) (2022)
- [Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14799/) (2020)
- [AI Chains: Transparent and Controllable Human-AI Interaction by Chaining Large Language Model Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01691/) (2021)
- [Demystifying Prompts in Language Models via Perplexity Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04037/) (2022)
- [Active Example Selection for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04486/) (2022)
- [Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14958/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models with Controllable Working Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05110/) (2022)
- [Improving Passage Retrieval with Zero-Shot Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07496/) (2022)
- [Ask Me Anything: A simple strategy for prompting language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02441/) (2022)
- [Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01984/) (2018)
- [Gmail Smart Compose: Real-Time Assisted Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00080/) (2019)
- [Personalisation within bounds: A risk taxonomy and policy framework for the alignment of large language models with personalised feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05453/) (2023)
- [Sparks: Inspiration for Science Writing using Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07640/) (2021)
- [Help me write a poem: Instruction Tuning as a Vehicle for Collaborative Poetry Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13669/) (2022)
- [Coverage-based Example Selection for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14907/) (2023)
- [Smart Reply: Automated Response Suggestion for Email](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04870/) (2016)
- [Generating Personalized Recipes from Historical User Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00105/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14225/) (2025)
- [Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15412/) (2024)
- [LongLaMP: A Benchmark for Personalized Long-form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11016/) (2024)
- [From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14851/) (2024)
- [Personalized Pieces: Efficient Personalized Large Language Models through Collaborative Efforts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10471/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Personalized Large Language Models: Progress and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11528/) (2025)
- [Aligning LLM Agents by Learning Latent Preference from User Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15269/) (2024)
- [HYDRA: Model Factorization Framework for Black-Box LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02888/) (2024)
- [Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02450/) (2025)
- [Can Language Models Reason about Individualistic Human Values and Preferences?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03868/) (2024)
- [AI PERSONA: Towards Life-long Personalization of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13103/) (2024)
- [LaMP-QA: A Benchmark for Personalized Long-form Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00137/) (2025)
- [Think-While-Generating: On-the-Fly Reasoning for Personalized Long-Form Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06690/) (2025)
- [Reasoning-Enhanced Self-Training for Long-Form Personalized Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04167/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Personalized and Pluralistic Preference Alignment in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07070/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10147/) (2025)
- [ExPerT: Effective and Explainable Evaluation of Personalized Long-Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14956/) (2025)
- [SocialMind: LLM-based Proactive AR Social Assistive System with Human-like Perception for In-situ Live Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04036/) (2024)
- [Prototypical Human-AI Collaboration Behaviors from LLM-Assisted Writing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16023/) (2025)
- [Retrieval Augmented Generation with Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05731/) (2025)
- [Comparing Retrieval-Augmentation and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Privacy-Preserving Personalization of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09510/) (2024)
- [On the Way to LLM Personalization: Learning to Remember User Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13405/) (2024)
- [Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20849/) (2025)
- [GhostWriter: Augmenting Collaborative Human-AI Writing Experiences Through Personalization and Agency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08855/) (2024)
- [Instant Personalized Large Language Model Adaptation via Hypernetwork](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16282/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Potential of LLMs as Personalized Assistants: Dataset, Evaluation, and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01262/) (2025)
- [Social Skill Training with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04204/) (2024)
- [Navigating the Path of Writing: Outline-guided Text Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13919/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Powerful large language models have facilitated the development of writing assistants that promise to significantly improve the quality and efficiency of composition and communication. However, a barrier to effective assistance is the lack of personalization in LLM outputs to the author's communication style, specialized knowledge, and values. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Pearl, a LLM writing assistant personalized with a retriever that is trained to be generation-calibrated for personalization. Generation calibration ensures that our retriever selects historic user authored documents to augment an LLM prompt such that they are likely to help an LLM generation better adhere to a users' preferences. We propose two key novelties for training such a retriever: (1) A training data selection method that identifies user requests likely to benefit from personalization and documents that provide that benefit; and (2) A scale-calibrating KL-divergence objective that ensures that our retriever scores remain proportional to the downstream generation quality from using the document for personalized generation. In a series of holistic evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Pearl in generating long-form texts on multiple social media datasets. Finally, we demonstrate how a generation-calibrated retriever can double as a performance predictor -- detecting low quality retrieval, and improving potentially under-performing outputs via revision with LLMs.