Chimaobi Okite

Chimaobi Okite

PhD Candidate

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Benchmarking and Improving LLM Robustness for Personalized Generation

Published in Findings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in personalizing the responses of large language models (LLMs). While existing evaluations primarily focus on whether a response aligns with a user’s preferences, we argue that factuality is an equally important yet often overlooked dimension. In the context of personalization, we define a model as robust if its responses are both factually accurate and align with the user preferences. To assess this, we introduce PERG, a scalable framework for evaluating robustness in LLMs, along with a new dataset, PERGData. We evaluate twelve state-of-the-art models across four prompting strategies. Our findings show that current LLMs struggle with robust personalization: even the strongest model (LLaMA3-70B) fails to maintain correctness in 5% of previously successful cases without personalization, while smaller models (e.g., 7B-scale) can fail more than 20% of the time. Further analysis reveals that robustness is significantly affected by the nature of the query and the type of user preference. To mitigate these failures, we propose Pref-Aligner, a two-stage approach that improves robustness by an average of 25% across models. Our work highlights critical gaps in current evaluation practices and introduces tools and metrics to support more reliable, user-aligned LLM deployments.

Recommended citation: Chimaobi Okite, Naihao Deng, Kiran Bodipati, Huaidian Hou, Joyce Chai, Rada Mihalcea. (2025). "Benchmarking and Improving LLM Robustness for Personalized Generation" In Findings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing .
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