PersonaFactor: Preference Factors with Dynamic Selection for LLM Personalization

Abstract

Although users may express different personalization needs across tasks, these task-specific behaviors can reflect shared underlying preference mechanisms. Existing LLM personalization methods often focus on surface-level interactions or undifferentiated histories, overlooking the shared mechanisms underlying these behaviors. We introduce PersonaFactors, a framework that distills reusable and interpretable personalization factors from heterogeneous user interactions. We construct a library of thirteen PersonaFactors by extracting evidence-grounded rationales and clustering recurring patterns across tasks, and develop a dynamic factor-guided generation framework that selects factors relevant to each user's history and current request. Across four personalization benchmarks and four backbone models, Dynamic PersonaFactor achieves the best score on every reported metric. Representation analyses further show that PersonaFactors and user history induce partially overlapping low-dimensional representations, and that their joint use yields complementary shifts. Taken together, these findings suggest that factor-based and history-based personalization can mutually reinforce each other.