Conf-Profile: A Confidence-Driven Reasoning Paradigm for Label-Free User Profiling
On the map: LLM reasoning → Reinforcement learning for reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
User profiling, as a core technique for user understanding, aims to infer structural attributes from user information. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a promising avenue for user profiling, yet the progress is hindered by the lack of comprehensive benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we propose ProfileBench, an industrial benchmark derived from a real-world video platform, encompassing heterogeneous user data and a well-structured profiling taxonomy. However, the profiling task remains challenging due to the difficulty of collecting large-scale ground-truth labels, and the heterogeneous and noisy user information can compromise the reliability of LLMs. To approach label-free and reliable user profiling, we propose a Confidence-driven Profile reasoning framework Conf-Profile, featuring a two-stage paradigm. We first synthesize high-quality labels by leveraging advanced LLMs with confidence hints, followed by confidence-weighted voting for accuracy improvement and confidence calibration for a balanced distribution. The multiple profile results, rationales, and confidence scores are aggregated and distilled into a lightweight LLM. We further enhance the reasoning ability via confidence-guided unsupervised reinforcement learning, which exploits confidence for difficulty filtering, quasi-ground truth voting, and reward weighting. Experimental results demonstrate that Conf-Profile delivers substantial performance through the two-stage training, improving F1 by 13.97 on Qwen3-8B.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 23 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2025.
Builds on
23 of 39 references.
Closest ancestors · 3
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Confidence Is All You Need: Few-Shot RL Fine-Tuning of Language Models5 Jun
- 2025TTRL: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning22 Apr
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning22 Jan
Other references · 20
- 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
- 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
- 2022Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Knowcited by 1,856
- 2023Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMscited by 974
- 2025Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligencecited by 567
- 2024Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personascited by 417
- 2023Chat-REC: Towards Interactive and Explainable LLMs-Augmented Recommender Systemcited by 242
- 2025Deep Think with Confidencecited by 205
- 2025Uncertainty Quantification and Confidence Calibration in Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 95
- 2021User Preference-aware Fake News Detectioncited by 79
8 more
- 2025Efficient Test-Time Scaling via Self-Calibrationcited by 75
- 2025Rewarding Doubt: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Calibrated Confidence Expression of Large Language Modelscited by 52
- 2025Mind the Confidence Gap: Overconfidence, Calibration, and Distractor Effects in Large Language Modelscited by 40
- 2025Towards Objective Fine-tuning: How LLMs' Prior Knowledge Causes Potential Poor Calibration?cited by 11
- 2025Towards Explainable Temporal User Profiling with LLMscited by 6
- 2025Evaluating Podcast Recommendations with Profile-Aware LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 6
- 2024Prompt Tuning as User Inherent Profile Inference Machinecited by 5
- 2025User Profile with Large Language Models: Construction, Updating, and Benchmarkingcited by 5
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
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- 2025Temporal User Profiling with LLMs: Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Preferences for Recommendations
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- 2025Through Their Eyes: User Perceptions on Sensitive Attribute Inference of Social Media Videos by Visual Language Models
- 2025Auditing M-LLMs for Privacy Risks: A Synthetic Benchmark and Evaluation Framework ↗
- 2025When Ads Become Profiles: Uncovering the Invisible Risk of Web Advertising at Scale with LLMs