Paper Detail

Preference-Aware Rubric Learning for Personalized Evaluation

Yilun Qiu, Xiaoyan Zhao, Yang Zhang, Yuxin Chen, Cilin Yan, Jiayin Cai, Xiaolong Jiang, Yao Hu, Yoko Yamakata, Tat-Seng Chua

arxiv Score 13.8

Published 2026-05-29 · First seen 2026-06-01

General AI

Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from general-purpose assistants to user-centric agents, personalization has become central to aligning model behavior with individual preferences, making the evaluation of personalized alignment a critical bottleneck. Existing evaluation methods-ranging from automatic metrics to LLM-as-a-judge approaches-fail to capture subjective, user-specific preferences embedded in long-term interaction histories. We identify three essential principles for reliable and effective personalized evaluation: Representativeness, User-Consistency, and Discriminativeness. To address these principles, we introduce Personalized Evaluation as Learning, a paradigm that formulates personalized evaluation as a learning problem rather than a static judgment. Under this paradigm, we propose PARL (Preference-Aware Rubric Learning for Personalized Evaluation), a framework that learns to induce preference-aware evaluation rubrics directly from raw user histories and performs a self-validation mechanism to ensure consistency with the user's preferences. PARL integrates rubric induction with a discriminative reinforcement learning objective that contrasts user-authored responses against competitive personalized model outputs, enabling the learned rubrics to capture precise, user-specific decision boundaries. Experiments on real-world personalized text generation tasks show that PARL consistently induces high-fidelity rubrics that reliably identify user-aligned responses and generalize across users and tasks, while capturing stable stylistic preferences and fine-grained evaluative patterns. To ensure reproducibility, our code is available at https://github.com/SnowCharmQ/PARL.

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BibTeX

@article{qiu2026preference,
  title = {Preference-Aware Rubric Learning for Personalized Evaluation},
  author = {Yilun Qiu and Xiaoyan Zhao and Yang Zhang and Yuxin Chen and Cilin Yan and Jiayin Cai and Xiaolong Jiang and Yao Hu and Yoko Yamakata and Tat-Seng Chua},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from general-purpose assistants to user-centric agents, personalization has become central to aligning model behavior with individual preferences, making the evaluation of personalized alignment a critical bottleneck. Existing evaluation methods-ranging from automatic metrics to LLM-as-a-judge approaches-fail to capture subjective, user-specific preferences embedded in long-term interaction histories. We identify three essential principles for reliable and },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31545},
  keywords = {cs.CL},
  eprint = {2605.31545},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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