# TAMEing Long Contexts in Personalization: Towards Training-Free and State-Aware MLLM Personalized Assistant

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21616 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21616/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 13 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10144/) (2023)
- [A Survey on RAG Meeting LLMs: Towards Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06211/) (2024)
- [jina-embeddings-v4: Universal Embeddings for Multimodal Multilingual Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18902/) (2025)
- [CoRAL: Collaborative Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models Improve Long-tail Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06447/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Dynamic Prompt Tuning for Incomplete Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01120/) (2025)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Visual Question Answering via Built-in Autoregressive Search Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16641/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Personal Visual Context Learning in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10936/) (2026)
- [Contextualized Visual Personalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03454/) (2026)
- [Personal Visual Memory from Explicit and Implicit Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28806/) (2026)
- [Omni-Persona: Systematic Benchmarking and Improving Omnimodal Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09996/) (2026)
- [Position: Life-Logging Video Streams Make the Privacy-Utility Trade-off Inevitable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10404/) (2026)
- [Parametric Multimodal User Memory: Storing What Captions Cannot Carry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28609/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) Personalization is a critical research problem that facilitates personalized dialogues with MLLMs targeting specific entities (known as personalized concepts). However, existing methods and benchmarks focus on the simple, context-agnostic visual identification and textual replacement of the personalized concept (e.g., "A yellow puppy" -> "Your puppy Mochi"), overlooking the ability to support long-context conversations. An ideal personalized MLLM assistant is capable of engaging in long-context dialogues with humans and continually improving its experience quality by learning from past dialogue histories. To bridge this gap, we propose LCMP, the first Long-Context MLLM Personalization evaluation benchmark. LCMP assesses the capability of MLLMs in perceiving variations of personalized concepts and generating contextually appropriate personalized responses that reflect these variations. As a strong baseline for LCMP, we introduce a novel training-free and state-aware framework TAME. TAME endows MLLMs with double memories to manage the temporal and persistent variations of each personalized concept in a differentiated manner. In addition, TAME incorporates a new training-free Retrieve-then-Align Augmented Generation (RA2G) paradigm. RA2G introduces an alignment step to extract the contextually fitted information from the multi-memory retrieved knowledge to the current questions, enabling better interactions for complex real-world user queries. Experiments on LCMP demonstrate that TAME achieves the best performance, showcasing remarkable and evolving interaction experiences in long-context scenarios.