Toward Robust Personalized Alignment for LLMs: Mitigating Persona Drift in Multi-Turn Dialogue

Abstract:Persona drift remains a central challenge for personalized language models, as user profiles evolve over long interactions rather than remain permanently fixed. Models must therefore revise persistent persona states when preferences genuinely change, while avoiding updates driven by transient, ambiguous, or unresolved observations. We propose CORE, which separates turn-local evidence from persistent persona-state revision and selectively updates grounded user preferences through uncertainty-aware belief revision. We also introduce PERSIST, a held-out post-anchor benchmark for persona-state robustness under sequential interaction stress, covering ambiguity, conflict, and controlled social influence. Across ALOE, PersonaChat, and PERSIST, CORE improves personalized alignment and robustness, with complementary gains in normalized closed-slot state fidelity. Human evaluation and mechanistic controls further support explicit update control beyond stronger generation or persistent memory alone.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.12373 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.12373v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.12373 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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