# Improving RAG for Personalization with Author Features and Contrastive Examples

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08745 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08745/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RAG pipeline design and evaluation, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 21 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [RAG pipeline design and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/rag/rag-pipeline-design-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19860/) (2023)
- [The Power of Noise: Redefining Retrieval for RAG Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14887/) (2024)
- [OpenChat: Advancing Open-source Language Models with Mixed-Quality Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11235/) (2023)
- [Optimization Methods for Personalizing Large Language Models through Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05970/) (2024)
- [Pearl: Personalizing Large Language Model Writing Assistants with Generation-Calibrated Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09180/) (2023)
- [Democratizing Large Language Models via Personalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04401/) (2024)
- [Personalized Pieces: Efficient Personalized Large Language Models through Collaborative Efforts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10471/) (2024)
- [HYDRA: Model Factorization Framework for Black-Box LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02888/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09277/) (2023)
- [Teach LLMs to Personalize -- An Approach inspired by Writing Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07968/) (2023)
- [Comparing Retrieval-Augmentation and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Privacy-Preserving Personalization of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09510/) (2024)
- [Personalized Text Generation with Fine-Grained Linguistic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04914/) (2024)
- [Understanding the Role of User Profile in the Personalization of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17803/) (2024)
- [The Impact of Quantization on Retrieval-Augmented Generation: An Analysis of Small LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10251/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20849/) (2025)
- [IntPro: A Proxy Agent for Context-Aware Intent Understanding via Retrieval-conditioned Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03325/) (2026)
- [ReLay: Personalized LLM-Generated Plain-Language Summaries for Better Understanding, but at What Cost?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00468/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalization with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) often fails to capture fine-grained features of authors, making it hard to identify their unique traits. To enrich the RAG context, we propose providing Large Language Models (LLMs) with author-specific features, such as average sentiment polarity and frequently used words, in addition to past samples from the author's profile. We introduce a new feature called Contrastive Examples: documents from other authors are retrieved to help LLM identify what makes an author's style unique in comparison to others. Our experiments show that adding a couple of sentences about the named entities, dependency patterns, and words a person uses frequently significantly improves personalized text generation. Combining features with contrastive examples boosts the performance further, achieving a relative 15% improvement over baseline RAG while outperforming the benchmarks. Our results show the value of fine-grained features for better personalization, while opening a new research dimension for including contrastive examples as a complement with RAG. We release our code publicly.