Persona Learning from Feedback for Personalized AI Assistants
Yiran Shen, Yu Xia, Liuyi Yao, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu
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.