# Many Preferences, Few Policies: Towards Scalable Language Model Personalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04144 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04144/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Human values and AI feedback alignment, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 35 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Human values and AI feedback alignment](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/human-values-and-ai-feedback-alignment/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [BeaverTails: Towards Improved Safety Alignment of LLM via a Human-Preference Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04657/) (2023)
- [Fine-Grained Human Feedback Gives Better Rewards for Language Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01693/) (2023)
- [Interpretable Preferences via Multi-Objective Reward Modeling and Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12845/) (2024)
- [Skywork-Reward: Bag of Tricks for Reward Modeling in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18451/) (2024)
- [A Practical Guide to Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning and Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09568/) (2021)
- [Rewarded soups: towards Pareto-optimal alignment by interpolating weights fine-tuned on diverse rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04488/) (2023)
- [A Generalized Algorithm for Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning and Policy Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08342/) (2019)
- [Rewards-in-Context: Multi-objective Alignment of Foundation Models with Dynamic Preference Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10207/) (2024)
- [Llumnix: Dynamic Scheduling for Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03243/) (2024)
- [HelpSteer: Multi-attribute Helpfulness Dataset for SteerLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09528/) (2023)
- [Beyond One-Preference-Fits-All Alignment: Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03708/) (2023)
- [Rule Based Rewards for Language Model Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01111/) (2024)
- [Decoding-Time Language Model Alignment with Multiple Objectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18853/) (2024)
- [Sample-Efficient Multi-Objective Learning via Generalized Policy Improvement Prioritization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07784/) (2023)
- [Conditional Language Policy: A General Framework for Steerable Multi-Objective Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15762/) (2024)
- [The Perfect Blend: Redefining RLHF with Mixture of Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20370/) (2024)
- [LoRe: Personalizing LLMs via Low-Rank Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14439/) (2025)
- [Language Model Personalization via Reward Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06358/) (2025)
- [From 1,000,000 Users to Every User: Scaling Up Personalized Preference for User-level Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15463/) (2025)
- [PARM: Multi-Objective Test-Time Alignment via Preference-Aware Autoregressive Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06274/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10147/) (2025)
- [Robust Multi-Objective Preference Alignment with Online DPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00295/) (2025)
- [Multi-objective Large Language Model Alignment with Hierarchical Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20925/) (2025)
- [Which Lp norm is the fairest? Approximations for fair facility location across all "p"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14873/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aligning large language models (LLMs) requires balancing competing objectives such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and conciseness. The appropriate balance varies across users and applications, yet training, evaluating, and deploying many policies across different reward weights is costly. We study how to identify a small portfolio of LLMs that preserves near-optimal performance across all reward weightings. We propose PALM (Portfolio of Aligned LLMs), an algorithm that combines a structured grid of weight vectors, a lazy search that optimizes policies only where needed, and pruning. Given target approximation tolerances, PALM returns a portfolio that provably contains a near-optimal policy for every weight vector, with an explicit upper bound on portfolio size. Such portfolios can support scalable personalization, reward-weight exploration during model development, and compact decoding-time configurations. Experiments show that PALM generally achieves smaller approximation gaps than same-size portfolios built from uniformly spaced or randomly sampled weights. We further demonstrate that PALM scales effectively to higher-dimensional reward spaces through efficient search and sparse preference structure.