VISTA: Steering LLMs with Latent User Values Inferred from a Few Survey Answers
Advances personalized AI alignment research with efficient value inference techniques for researchers.
AI Summary
VISTA introduces a method to personalize LLMs by inferring latent user values from minimal survey responses and applying hypernetwork-based steering interventions.
Excerpt
Personalizing a language model requires knowing what a person values, which stays largely consistent across tasks. Yet most methods either learn task-specific preferences or place the user's profile in the prompt, where models struggle to act on it. We introduce VISTA (Value-Informed Steering and Targeted Acquisition), which infers a latent profile from users' (full or partial) survey answers, and maps the profile through a hypernetwork to a user-specific steering intervention in a frozen LLM to
