# PREFINE: Personalized Story Generation via Simulated User Critics and User-Specific Rubric Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21721/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11738/) (2023)
- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [LLM Evaluators Recognize and Favor Their Own Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13076/) (2024)
- [Toxicity in ChatGPT: Analyzing Persona-assigned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05335/) (2023)
- [LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10109/) (2024)
- [PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02547/) (2023)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06774/) (2022)
- [Democratizing Large Language Models via Personalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04401/) (2024)
- [CriticBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Critique-Correct Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14809/) (2024)
- [Of Human Criteria and Automatic Metrics: A Benchmark of the Evaluation of Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11646/) (2022)
- [Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02614/) (2025)
- [Learning Personalized Alignment for Evaluating Open-ended Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03304/) (2023)
- [Collective Critics for Creative Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02428/) (2024)
- [Whose Boat Does it Float? Improving Personalization in Preference Tuning via Inferred User Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11549/) (2025)
- [Are Generative AI Agents Effective Personalized Financial Advisors?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05862/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Potential of LLMs as Personalized Assistants: Dataset, Evaluation, and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01262/) (2025)
- [MPST: A Corpus of Movie Plot Synopses with Tags](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07858/) (2018)
- [MirrorStories: Reflecting Diversity through Personalized Narrative Generation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13935/) (2024)
- [End-to-end Story Plot Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08796/) (2023)
- [Whose story is it? Personalizing story generation by inferring author styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13028/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Toward Personalized LLM-Powered Agents: Foundations, Evaluation, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22680/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalizing story generation to individual users remains a core challenge in natural language generation. Existing approaches typically require explicit user feedback or fine-tuning, which pose practical concerns in terms of usability, scalability, and privacy. In this work, we introduce PREFINE (Persona-and-Rubric Guided Critique-and-Refine), a novel Critique-and-Refine framework that enables personalized story generation without user feedback or parameter updates. PREFINE constructs a pseudo-user agent from a user's interaction history and generates user-specific rubrics (evaluation criteria). These components are used to critique and iteratively refine story drafts toward the user's preferences. We evaluate PREFINE on two benchmark datasets, PerDOC and PerMPST, and compare it with existing approaches. Both automatic and human evaluations show that PREFINE achieves significantly better personalization while preserving general story quality. Notably, PREFINE outperforms existing in-context personalization and critique-based generation methods, and can even enhance already personalized outputs through post-hoc refinement. Our analysis reveals that user-specific rubrics are critical in driving personalization. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of inference-only, rubric-guided personalization, with potential applications beyond storytelling, including dialogue, recommendation, and education.