# EXACT: Explicit Attribute-Guided Decoding-Time Personalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17695 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17695/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Decoding: Open-ended Text Generation as Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15097/) (2022)
- [Fine-Grained Human Feedback Gives Better Rewards for Language Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01693/) (2023)
- [Controlled Decoding from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17022/) (2023)
- [Beyond One-Preference-Fits-All Alignment: Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03708/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Aligning to Thousands of Preferences via System Message Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17977/) (2024)
- [LLM-Rec: Personalized Recommendation via Prompting Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15780/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Personalized Large Language Models: Progress and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11528/) (2025)
- [Decoding-time Realignment of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02992/) (2024)
- [Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11792/) (2023)
- [Value Augmented Sampling for Language Model Alignment and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06639/) (2024)
- [Integrating Summarization and Retrieval for Enhanced Personalization via Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20081/) (2023)
- [Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02614/) (2025)
- [Personalized Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09269/) (2024)
- [LoRe: Personalizing LLMs via Low-Rank Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14439/) (2025)
- [Guarantees for Greedy Maximization of Non-submodular Functions with Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02100/) (2017)
- [Personalized LLM Response Generation with Parameterized Memory Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03565/) (2024)
- [Customizing Language Models with Instance-wise LoRA for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10159/) (2024)
- [Amulet: ReAlignment During Test Time for Personalized Preference Adaptation of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19148/) (2025)
- [Linear Alignment: A Closed-form Solution for Aligning Human Preferences without Tuning and Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11458/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Preference-Based Self-Distillation: Beyond KL Matching via Reward Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05040/) (2026)
- [Difficulty-Aware Semantic-ID Optimization for Generative Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20611/) (2026)
- [Toward Robust Personalized Alignment for LLMs: Mitigating Persona Drift in Multi-Turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12373/) (2026)
- [Personalize at Test Time: Learning User Preferences for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09015/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Achieving personalized alignment requires adapting large language models to each user's evolving context. While decoding-time personalization offers a scalable alternative to training-time methods, existing methods largely rely on implicit, less interpretable preference representations and impose a rigid, context-agnostic user representation, failing to account for how preferences shift across prompts. We introduce EXACT, a new decoding-time personalization that aligns generation with limited pairwise preference feedback using a predefined set of interpretable attributes. EXACT first identifies user-specific attribute subsets by maximizing the likelihood of preferred responses in the offline stage. Then, for online inference, EXACT retrieves the most semantically relevant attributes for an incoming prompt and injects them into the context to steer generation. We establish theoretical approximation guarantees for the proposed algorithm under mild assumptions, and provably show that our similarity-based retrieval mechanism effectively mitigates contextual preference shifts, adapting to disparate tasks without pooling conflicting preferences. Extensive experiments on human-annotated preference datasets demonstrate that EXACT consistently outperforms strong baselines, including preference modeling accuracy and personalized generation quality.