Selective Prompting Tuning for Personalized Conversations with LLMs

Qiushi Huang, Xubo Liu, Tom Ko, Bo Wu, Wenwu Wang, Yu Zhang, Lilian Tang


Abstract
In conversational AI, personalizing dialogues with persona profiles and contextual understanding is essential. Despite large language models’ (LLMs) improved response coherence, effective persona integration remains a challenge. In this work, we first study two common approaches for personalizing LLMs: textual prompting and direct fine-tuning. We observed that textual prompting often struggles to yield responses that are similar to the ground truths in datasets, while direct fine-tuning tends to produce repetitive or overly generic replies. To alleviate those issues, we propose **S**elective **P**rompt **T**uning (SPT), which softly prompts LLMs for personalized conversations in a selective way. Concretely, SPT initializes a set of soft prompts and uses a trainable dense retriever to adaptively select suitable soft prompts for LLMs according to different input contexts, where the prompt retriever is dynamically updated through feedback from the LLMs. Additionally, we propose context-prompt contrastive learning and prompt fusion learning to encourage the SPT to enhance the diversity of personalized conversations. Experiments on the CONVAI2 dataset demonstrate that SPT significantly enhances response diversity by up to 90%, along with improvements in other critical performance indicators. Those results highlight the efficacy of SPT in fostering engaging and personalized dialogue generation. The SPT model code is [publicly available](https://github.com/hqsiswiliam/SPT) for further exploration.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.959
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16212–16226
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.959
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qiushi Huang, Xubo Liu, Tom Ko, Bo Wu, Wenwu Wang, Yu Zhang, and Lilian Tang. 2024. Selective Prompting Tuning for Personalized Conversations with LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 16212–16226, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Selective Prompting Tuning for Personalized Conversations with LLMs (Huang et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.959.pdf