# Do LLMs Recognize Your Preferences? Evaluating Personalized Preference Following in LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 148 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01798/) (2023)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11998/) (2023)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [∞Bench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13718/) (2024)
- [Efficient Attentions for Long Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02112/) (2021)
- [TALLRec: An Effective and Efficient Tuning Framework to Align Large Language Model with Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00447/) (2023)
- [Personalized Soups: Personalized Large Language Model Alignment via Post-hoc Parameter Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11564/) (2023)
- [L-Eval: Instituting Standardized Evaluation for Long Context Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11088/) (2023)
- [BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10149/) (2024)
- [Many-Shot In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11018/) (2024)
- [LooGLE: Can Long-Context Language Models Understand Long Contexts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04939/) (2023)
- [RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00746/) (2023)
- [In-Context Learning with Long-Context Models: An In-Depth Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00200/) (2024)
- [Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01984/) (2018)
- [Democratizing Large Language Models via Personalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04401/) (2024)
- [Aligning to Thousands of Preferences via System Message Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17977/) (2024)
- [Group Preference Optimization: Few-Shot Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11523/) (2023)
- [HYDRA: Model Factorization Framework for Black-Box LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02888/) (2024)
- [Teach LLMs to Personalize -- An Approach inspired by Writing Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07968/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 148)

- [Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14225/) (2025)
- [MemOS: A Memory OS for AI System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03724/) (2025)
- [PersonaMem-v2: Towards Personalized Intelligence via Learning Implicit User Personas and Agentic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06688/) (2025)
- [UserBench: An Interactive Gym Environment for User-Centric Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22034/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Personalized Large Language Models: Progress and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11528/) (2025)
- [HaluMem: Evaluating Hallucinations in Memory Systems of Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03506/) (2025)
- [Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02450/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Personalized Alignment -- The Missing Piece for Large Language Models in Real-World Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17003/) (2025)
- [Consistently Simulating Human Personas with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00222/) (2025)
- [Bayesian Teaching Enables Probabilistic Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17523/) (2025)
- [UserRL: Training Interactive User-Centric Agent via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19736/) (2025)
- [Think-While-Generating: On-the-Fly Reasoning for Personalized Long-Form Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06690/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Personalized and Pluralistic Preference Alignment in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07070/) (2025)
- [Graph-based Agent Memory: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05665/) (2026)
- [Teaching Language Models to Evolve with Users: Dynamic Profile Modeling for Personalized Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15456/) (2025)
- [AgentRecBench: Benchmarking LLM Agent-based Personalized Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19623/) (2025)
- [CUPID: Evaluating Personalized and Contextualized Alignment of LLMs from Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01674/) (2025)
- [OP-Bench: Benchmarking Over-Personalization for Memory-Augmented Personalized Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13722/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Long-Horizon Memory for Multi-Party Collaborative Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01313/) (2026)
- [Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20849/) (2025)
- [From Storage to Experience: A Survey on the Evolution of LLM Agent Memory Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06716/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Personalized Tool-Augmented LLMs from the Perspectives of Personalization and Proactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00771/) (2025)
- [MemoryCD: Benchmarking Long-Context User Memory of LLM Agents for Lifelong Cross-Domain Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25973/) (2026)
- [HorizonBench: Long-Horizon Personalization with Evolving Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17283/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Long-Context Reasoning in LLM-Based WebAgents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04307/) (2025)
- [MMPB: It's Time for Multi-Modal Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22820/) (2025)
- [Persona2Web: Benchmarking Personalized Web Agents for Contextual Reasoning with User History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17003/) (2026)
- [Toward Personalized LLM-Powered Agents: Foundations, Evaluation, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22680/) (2026)
- [PERMA: Benchmarking Personalized Memory Agents via Event-Driven Preference and Realistic Task Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23231/) (2026)
- [GateMem: Benchmarking Memory Governance in Multi-Principal Shared-Memory Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18829/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as chatbots, yet their ability to personalize responses to user preferences remains limited. We introduce PrefEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to infer, memorize and adhere to user preferences in a long-context conversational setting. PrefEval comprises 3,000 manually curated user preference and query pairs spanning 20 topics. PrefEval contains user personalization or preference information in both explicit and implicit forms, and evaluates LLM performance using a generation and a classification task. With PrefEval, we evaluated the aforementioned preference following capabilities of 10 open-source and proprietary LLMs in multi-session conversations with varying context lengths up to 100k tokens. We benchmark with various prompting, iterative feedback, and retrieval-augmented generation methods. Our benchmarking effort reveals that state-of-the-art LLMs face significant challenges in proactively following users' preferences during conversations. In particular, in zero-shot settings, preference following accuracy falls below 10% at merely 10 turns (~3k tokens) across most evaluated models. Even with advanced prompting and retrieval methods, preference following still deteriorates in long-context conversations. Furthermore, we show that fine-tuning on PrefEval significantly improves performance. We believe PrefEval serves as a valuable resource for measuring, understanding, and enhancing LLMs' preference following abilities, paving the way for personalized conversational agents. Our code and dataset are available at https://prefeval.github.io/.