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arXiv · 2610.38561

Persona Learning from Feedback for Personalized AI Assistants

Yiran Shen·Yu Xia·Liuyi Yao·Prithviraj Ammanabrolu
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Abstract

Personalizing AI assistants requires adapting their behavior to users' preferences and task contexts. Existing work elicits assistant personas through persona prompting or finetuning on persona-conditioned generations. However, persona descriptions alone do not identify what to change or preserve in a particular response, or which behaviors suit the current request. We introduce $\textit{Persona Learning from Feedback (PLF)}$, a framework that learns reusable, preference-grounded assistant personas as independent LoRA adapters on a shared frozen backbone. During training, a frozen self-teacher conditions on persona specifications and response-specific feedback to provide token-level supervision on each adapter's own generated prefixes. A feedback gate focuses corrective updates on responses judged to need improvement. At deployment, a supervised router uses the request or dialogue to select a single adapter or a fixed composition, without user-specific finetuning. We evaluate PLF on single-turn personalization with model-generated critiques and multi-turn tutoring with simulated students' reactions. Across both settings, PLF improves model-judged preference fit over fixed-persona policies and strong baselines including persona prompting and persona distillation, demonstrating how feedback-trained behaviors can be reused for adaptive assistant personalization without degrading general capabilities.

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Yiran Shen, Yu Xia, Liuyi Yao, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu. 2026-10-28. Persona Learning from Feedback for Personalized AI Assistants. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38561

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