# Do Implicit Personalization and Explicit Styles Conflict? PsPLUG: A Lightweight Plug-in for Balancing Personalization and Style in Customized LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06362 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06362/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [P-Tuning v2: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Universally Across Scales and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07602/) (2021)
- [Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01535/) (2024)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09741/) (2022)
- [Personalized Soups: Personalized Large Language Model Alignment via Post-hoc Parameter Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11564/) (2023)
- [From Persona to Personalization: A Survey on Role-Playing Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18231/) (2024)
- [Quantifying the Persona Effect in LLM Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10811/) (2024)
- [Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01984/) (2018)
- [Optimization Methods for Personalizing Large Language Models through Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05970/) (2024)
- [LongLaMP: A Benchmark for Personalized Long-form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11016/) (2024)
- [Pearl: Personalizing Large Language Model Writing Assistants with Generation-Calibrated Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09180/) (2023)
- [RAG vs Fine-tuning: Pipelines, Tradeoffs, and a Case Study on Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08406/) (2024)
- [Aligning LLM Agents by Learning Latent Preference from User Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15269/) (2024)
- [HYDRA: Model Factorization Framework for Black-Box LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02888/) (2024)
- [PAD: Personalized Alignment of LLMs at Decoding-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04070/) (2024)
- [Generating Personalized Recipes from Historical User Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00105/) (2019)
- [Less is More: Learning to Refine Dialogue History for Personalized Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08128/) (2022)
- [Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02450/) (2025)
- [Personalized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09269/) (2024)
- [Towards Teachable Reasoning Systems: Using a Dynamic Memory of User Feedback for Continual System Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13074/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized large language models are often expected to follow explicit style instructions, yet we find that such instructions can undermine the user-specific characteristics that personalization methods aim to preserve. We call this failure mode personalization collapse: explicit style control can conflict with implicit user preferences. To address this challenge, we propose PsPLUG, a lightweight plug-in that learns a user-specific residual after accounting for the requested style. PsPLUG also allows us to tune personalization strength at inference time. Our experiments show that explicit style instructions can diminish personalization in existing methods, whereas PsPLUG better preserves user preferences while providing precise control over the balance between personalization and style adherence.