# When More Data Is Not Enough: The Context-Sufficiency Frontier in Generative AI Personalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00654/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11324/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08319/) (2024)
- [Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02046/) (2023)
- [Same Task, More Tokens: the Impact of Input Length on the Reasoning Performance of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14848/) (2024)
- [An Empirical Study of the Non-determinism of ChatGPT in Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02828/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalization has long relied on customer data to infer what an individual is likely to value. We call this customer evidence: the customer's historical behavior and preferences. Generative AI extends personalization by allowing providers to supply changing situational information at the moment a response is produced, without encoding every condition in advance. We define this provider-side context as information about what is possible, permitted, or advisable now. This flexibility creates a new problem: once context becomes easy to supply, more is not necessarily better. We develop a theory of context sufficiency in which the relevance of context to the customer's current intent matters more than its volume. The theory identifies four states, insufficiency, sufficiency, saturation, and interference, and introduces the Context-Sufficiency Frontier to locate the minimal relevant set. In a full-factorial experiment with a generative recommender at a large home-furnishing retailer, relevant context improved appropriateness, while irrelevant context reduced it and destabilized retrieval. The framework shifts personalization from supplying more context toward identifying what the current interaction actually requires and enforcing constraints throughout the service process.