# Unlocking Latent Personalization in LLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33182/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06196/) (2024)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [Scaling Down to Scale Up: A Guide to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15647/) (2023)
- [The PRISM Alignment Dataset: What Participatory, Representative and Individualised Human Feedback Reveals About the Subjective and Multicultural Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16019/) (2024)
- [Democratizing Large Language Models via Personalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04401/) (2024)
- [PersonaMem-v2: Towards Personalized Intelligence via Learning Implicit User Personas and Agentic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06688/) (2025)
- [User-LLM: Efficient LLM Contextualization with User Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13598/) (2024)
- [Personalized Pieces: Efficient Personalized Large Language Models through Collaborative Efforts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10471/) (2024)
- [PersonalLLM: Tailoring LLMs to Individual Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20296/) (2024)
- [LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11901/) (2024)
- [Controllable Text Generation via Probability Density Estimation in the Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08307/) (2022)
- [Implicit Deep Latent Variable Models for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11527/) (2019)
- [PROPER: A Progressive Learning Framework for Personalized Large Language Models with Group-Level Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01303/) (2025)
- [Fuse It More Deeply! A Variational Transformer with Layer-Wise Latent Variable Inference for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06130/) (2022)
- [Instant Personalized Large Language Model Adaptation via Hypernetwork](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16282/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Potential of LLMs as Personalized Assistants: Dataset, Evaluation, and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01262/) (2025)
- [Aligning LLMs by Predicting Preferences from User Writing Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23815/) (2025)
- [Beyond Retrieval: Learning Compact User Representations for Scalable LLM Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04547/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to adapt to individual users, yet effective personalization remains challenging when only limited user-specific samples are available. In this work, we take an alternative perspective: pretrained LLMs may already possess latent capacity for personalization, and a few user samples may therefore suffice to guide the model toward user-aligned behavior with minimal user-specific adaptation. From this perspective, we propose LatentPersonal, a framework that formulates personalization as navigation in a shared latent adaptation space. LatentPersonal infers a compact latent representation from a few user samples to guide user-specific model adaptation, regularized with a variational information bottleneck to encourage compact preference representations. We instantiate LatentPersonal with LoRA, leveraging its low-rank parameterization as a natural low-dimensional adaptation space for personalization. By simply inserting a user-specific guidance vector between the shared low-rank factors, the model can navigate toward personalized adaptations through lightweight inference of this compact representation, without updating the shared LoRA parameters. Experiments across multiple personalization datasets demonstrate that LatentPersonal substantially reduces user-specific adaptation overhead while achieving effective personalization from only a few user-specific interactions, with particularly strong performance in the one-shot regime.