# Step-Back Profiling: Distilling User History for Personalized Scientific Writing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14275 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14275/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [Character-LLM: A Trainable Agent for Role-Playing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10158/) (2023)
- [MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10537/) (2023)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Generated Content (AIGC): A History of Generative AI from GAN to ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04226/) (2023)
- [Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06725/) (2019)
- [RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent For Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14296/) (2023)
- [Igniting Language Intelligence: The Hitchhiker's Guide From Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11797/) (2023)
- [CoGenesis: A Framework Collaborating Large and Small Language Models for Secure Context-Aware Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03129/) (2024)
- [BookGPT: A General Framework for Book Recommendation Empowered by Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15673/) (2023)
- [CREATER: CTR-driven Advertising Text Generation with Controlled Pre-Training and Contrastive Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08943/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11901/) (2024)
- [Embedding-to-Prefix: Parameter-Efficient Personalization for Pre-Trained Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17051/) (2025)
- [From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01424/) (2025)
- [HLLM-Creator: Hierarchical LLM-based Personalized Creative Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18118/) (2025)
- [CARD: Cluster-level Adaptation with Reward-guided Decoding for Personalized Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06352/) (2026)
- [Language Models Don't Know What You Want: Evaluating Personalization in Deep Research Needs Real Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16120/) (2026)
- [YNTP-100: A Benchmark for Your Next Token Prediction with 100 People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14398/) (2025)
- [Do Implicit Personalization and Explicit Styles Conflict? PsPLUG: A Lightweight Plug-in for Balancing Personalization and Style in Customized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06362/) (2026)
- [Can Large Language Models Simulate Human Cognition Beyond Behavioral Imitation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27694/) (2026)
- [CWF: A Collaborative Writing Framework for Personalized and Reliable Popular Science Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06126/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLM) excel at a variety of natural language processing tasks, yet they struggle to generate personalized content for individuals, particularly in real-world scenarios like scientific writing. Addressing this challenge, we introduce STEP-BACK PROFILING to personalize LLMs by distilling user history into concise profiles, including essential traits and preferences of users. To conduct the experiments, we construct a Personalized Scientific Writing (PSW) dataset to study multi-user personalization. PSW requires the models to write scientific papers given specialized author groups with diverse academic backgrounds. As for the results, we demonstrate the effectiveness of capturing user characteristics via STEP-BACK PROFILING for collaborative writing. Moreover, our approach outperforms the baselines by up to 3.6 points on the general personalization benchmark (LaMP), including 7 personalization LLM tasks. Our ablation studies validate the contributions of different components in our method and provide insights into our task definition. Our dataset and code are available at urlhttps://github.com/gersteinlab/step-back-profiling.