# ChildEval: When large language models meet children's personalities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27805 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.27805/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [WildChat: 1M ChatGPT Interaction Logs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01470/) (2024)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [Know Me, Respond to Me: Benchmarking LLMs for Dynamic User Profiling and Personalized Responses at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14225/) (2025)
- [Do LLMs Recognize Your Preferences? Evaluating Personalized Preference Following in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09597/) (2025)
- [Personalized Language Modeling from Personalized Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05133/) (2024)
- [MemoRAG: Boosting Long Context Processing with Global Memory-Enhanced Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05591/) (2024)
- [On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05589/) (2025)
- [LongLaMP: A Benchmark for Personalized Long-form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11016/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Personalized Large Language Models: Progress and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11528/) (2025)
- [Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02450/) (2025)
- [Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02614/) (2025)
- [ChaCha: Leveraging Large Language Models to Prompt Children to Share Their Emotions about Personal Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12244/) (2023)
- [SynthesizeMe! Inducing Persona-Guided Prompts for Personalized Reward Models in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05598/) (2025)
- [Teaching Language Models to Evolve with Users: Dynamic Profile Modeling for Personalized Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15456/) (2025)
- [On the Way to LLM Personalization: Learning to Remember User Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13405/) (2024)
- [Guided Profile Generation Improves Personalization with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13093/) (2024)
- [Personalize Your LLM: Fake it then Align it](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01048/) (2025)
- [Dialogue History Matters! Personalized Response Selectionin Multi-turn Retrieval-based Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09534/) (2021)
- [Embedding-to-Prefix: Parameter-Efficient Personalization for Pre-Trained Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17051/) (2025)
- [KidLM: Advancing Language Models for Children -- Early Insights and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03884/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Personalized Community Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22182/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking LLMs for Mimicking Child-Caregiver Language in Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09318/) (2024)
- [Characterizing LLM-Empowered Personalized Story-Reading and Interaction for Children: Insights from Multi-Stakeholder Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00590/) (2025)
- [Can Generic LLMs Help Analyze Child-adult Interactions Involving Children with Autism in Clinical Observation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10761/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Personalization Meets Safety:Mechanisms,Risks,and Mitigations in Personalized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09038/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While LLMs enable personalized chatbots, their effectiveness in child-centered personalization remains unclear, as systematic evaluation of child-specific preferences is still lacking. To address this gap, we introduce ChildEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to infer and follow child-centered preferences in long-context conversations. ChildEval contains 29K synthesized persona profiles of children aged 3-6, providing relatively static background information. Each persona is associated with a child preference-which may align with, conflict with, or be independent of the persona-expressed either explicitly in a single sentence or implicitly through 6-10 turn dialogues. Explicit and implicit preferences are designed to reflect the same underlying preference but differ in expression, capturing dynamic aspects of preference expression rather than changes in the static persona. The benchmark spans five top-level and fourteen sub-level categories covering children's daily lives and development. We further propose fine-grained, child-centric evaluation protocols to systematically assess open-source LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate how different personalized representations affect LLM responses and suggest that finetuning on ChildEval can enhance child-centered performance. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ziyanluo/ChildEval.