mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Toward Personalized LLM-Powered Agents: Foundations, Evaluation, and Future Directions

arXiv 2602.22680 ↗First posted 26 Feb 2026cs.AIcited by 10

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models have enabled agentic systems that reason, plan, and interact with tools and environments to accomplish complex tasks. As these agents operate over extended interaction horizons, their effectiveness increasingly depends on adapting behavior to individual users and maintaining continuity across interactions, giving rise to personalized LLM-powered agents (PLAs). In such long-term, user-dependent settings, personalization permeates the entire decision pipeline rather than remaining confined to surface-level response generation. This survey provides a capability-oriented review of personalized LLM-powered agents. Existing work is organized around four interdependent capabilities: profile modeling, memory, planning, and action execution. Using this taxonomy, representative methods are synthesized and analyzed to illustrate how user signals are represented, propagated, and utilized across the agent pipeline, highlighting cross-component interactions and recurring design challenges. Evaluation metrics and benchmarking paradigms tailored to personalized agents are further examined, along with application scenarios ranging from conversational assistants to domain-specific expert systems. By clarifying the design space of personalization in agent systems, this survey provides a structured foundation for developing more user-aligned, adaptive, and deployable LLM-powered agents.

Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 161 of its 237 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2026.

Builds on

161 of 237 references.

Closest ancestors · 14

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Structured Uncertainty guided Clarification for LLM Agents11 Nov
  2. 2025Training Proactive and Personalized LLM Agents4 Nov
  3. 2025Can LLMs Help You at Work? A Sandbox for Evaluating LLM Agents in Enterprise Environments31 Oct
  4. 2025COMPASS: Benchmarking Constrained Optimization in LLM Agents8 Oct
  5. 2025From Language to Action: A Review of Large Language Models as Autonomous Agents and Tool Users24 Aug
  6. 2025LLM-Powered AI Agent Systems and Their Applications in Industry22 May
  7. 2025From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review28 Apr
  8. 2024Ask-before-Plan: Proactive Language Agents for Real-World Planning18 Jun
  9. 2024A Review of Prominent Paradigms for LLM-Based Agents: Tool Use (Including RAG), Planning, and Feedback Learning9 Jun
  10. 2024Planning with Multi-Constraints via Collaborative Language Agents26 May
  11. 2023Adapting LLM Agents with Universal Feedback in Communication1 Oct
  12. 2023PlanFitting: Personalized Exercise Planning with Large Language Model-driven Conversational Agent22 Sep
2 more
  1. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents22 Aug
  2. 2023AdaPlanner: Adaptive Planning from Feedback with Language Models26 May

Other references · 147

  1. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  3. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  4. 2017Billion-scale similarity search with GPUscited by 2,477
  5. 2025s1: Simple test-time scalingcited by 1,311
  6. 2021Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learningcited by 1,203
  7. 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agentscited by 1,000
  8. 2024Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agentscited by 800
  9. 2023CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquingcited by 751
  10. 2024LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memorycited by 656
  11. 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agentscited by 622
  12. 2024RAPTOR: Recursive Abstractive Processing for Tree-Organized Retrievalcited by 519
38 more
  1. 2023LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalizationcited by 425
  2. 2025Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistantscited by 405
  3. 2025Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memorycited by 372
  4. 2025Evaluating Memory in LLM Agents via Incremental Multi-Turn Interactionscited by 236
  5. 2024AgentClinic: a multimodal agent benchmark to evaluate AI in simulated clinical environmentscited by 215
  6. 2024Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalizationcited by 203
  7. 2025Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scalecited by 163
  8. 2025LightMem: Lightweight and Efficient Memory-Augmented Generationcited by 163
  9. 2025MIRIX: Multi-Agent Memory System for LLM-Based Agentscited by 160
  10. 2024Personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with Variational Preference Learningcited by 147
  11. 2025Do LLMs Recognize Your Preferences? Evaluating Personalized Preference Following in LLMscited by 142
  12. 2023User Behavior Simulation with Large Language Model based Agentscited by 136
  13. 2025MemOS: A Memory OS for AI Systemcited by 129
  14. 2024Hello Again! LLM-powered Personalized Agent for Long-term Dialoguecited by 121
  15. 2025From Human Memory to AI Memory: A Survey on Memory Mechanisms in the Era of LLMscited by 119
  16. 2024MemoRAG: Boosting Long Context Processing with Global Memory-Enhanced Retrieval Augmentationcited by 118
  17. 2023AgentCF: Collaborative Learning with Autonomous Language Agents for Recommender Systemscited by 116
  18. 2022Long Time No See! Open-Domain Conversation with Long-Term Persona Memorycited by 107
  19. 2025On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agentscited by 101
  20. 2024AriGraph: Learning Knowledge Graph World Models with Episodic Memory for LLM Agentscited by 100
  21. 2024LongLaMP: A Benchmark for Personalized Long-form Text Generationcited by 91
  22. 2025Seeing, Listening, Remembering, and Reasoning: A Multimodal Agent with Long-Term Memorycited by 88
  23. 2025A Survey of LLM-based Agents in Medicine: How far are we from Baymax?cited by 84
  24. 2025MemInsight: Autonomous Memory Augmentation for LLM Agentscited by 84
  25. 2025PlanGenLLMs: A Modern Survey of LLM Planning Capabilitiescited by 82
  26. 2025PersonaMem-v2: Towards Personalized Intelligence via Learning Implicit User Personas and Agentic Memorycited by 82
  27. 2025AgentDAM: Privacy Leakage Evaluation for Autonomous Web Agentscited by 79
  28. 2024From Isolated Conversations to Hierarchical Schemas: Dynamic Tree Memory Representation for LLMscited by 77
  29. 2024User-LLM: Efficient LLM Contextualization with User Embeddingscited by 74
  30. 2024PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignmentcited by 71
  31. 2024Aligning LLM Agents by Learning Latent Preference from User Editscited by 66
  32. 2024Large Language Models Empowered Personalized Web Agentscited by 64
  33. 2024Aligning LLMs with Individual Preferences via Interactioncited by 63
  34. 2024MACRec: a Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Recommendationcited by 58
  35. 2025SceneWeaver: All-in-One 3D Scene Synthesis with an Extensible and Self-Reflective Agentcited by 53
  36. 2025SMART: Self-Aware Agent for Tool Overuse Mitigationcited by 52
  37. 2025Think Before Recommend: Unleashing the Latent Reasoning Power for Sequential Recommendationcited by 50
  38. 2024Persona-DB: Efficient Large Language Model Personalization for Response Prediction with Collaborative Data Refinementcited by 47

50 most cited of 147 All 147 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 10.

10 papers.

  1. 2026Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineeringcited by 68
  2. 2026Hidden in Memory: Sleeper Memory Poisoning in LLM Agentscited by 22
  3. 2026PERMA: Benchmarking Personalized Memory Agents via Event-Driven Preference and Realistic Task Environmentscited by 13
  4. 2026User as Code: Executable Memory for Personalized Agentscited by 7
  5. 2026ComBodied Agents: a New Paradigm of Human-Centric Agentic AIcited by 4
  6. 2026User as Engram: Internalizing Per-User Memory as Local Parametric Editscited by 2
  7. 2026Agents in the Large: Perception-Centered Architecture for Persistent Agentscited by 1
  8. 2026Do Personalized Skills Help Coding Agents? An Empirical Study of Developer Interaction Historiescited by 0
  9. 2026Graph-Based Personalized Memory for LLM Agents: Representation, Evolution, Retrieval, and Evaluationcited by 0
  10. 2026Rubric-Aware On-Policy Self-Distillation for LLM Personalizationcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Enabling Personalized Long-term Interactions in LLM-based Agents through Persistent Memory and User Profiles
  2. 2025PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents
  3. 2025LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey
  4. 2025Generalizability of Large Language Model-Based Agents: A Comprehensive Survey
  5. 2024Practical Considerations for Agentic LLM Systems
  6. 2025Position: The Real Barrier to LLM Agent Usability is Agentic ROI
  7. 2026PDEU-Bench: Benchmarking the Personalized Planning Lifecycle of Tool-Calling LLM Agents
  8. 2026From Profiling to Synthesis: Benchmarking Implicit Behavioral Alignment in Personalized LLM Agents