@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2025-persona,
title = "Persona-judge: Personalized Alignment of Large Language Models via Token-level Self-judgment",
author = "Zhang, Xiaotian and
Chen, Ruizhe and
Feng, Yang and
Liu, Zuozhu",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.260/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.260",
pages = "5037--5049",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
abstract = "Aligning language models with human preferences presents significant challenges, particularly in achieving personalization without incurring excessive computational costs. Existing methods rely on reward signals and additional annotated data, limiting their scalability and adaptability to diverse human values. To address these challenges, we introduce Persona-judge, a novel discriminative paradigm that enables training-free personalized alignment with unseen preferences. Instead of optimizing policy parameters through external reward feedback, Persona-judge leverages the intrinsic preference judgment capabilities of the model. Specifically, a draft model generates candidate tokens conditioned on a given preference, while a judge model, embodying another preference, cross-validates the predicted tokens whether to be accepted. Experimental results demonstrate that Persona-judge, using the inherent preference evaluation mechanisms of the model, offers a scalable and computationally efficient solution to personalized alignment, paving the way for more adaptive customized alignment. Our code is available here."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="zhang-etal-2025-persona">
<titleInfo>
<title>Persona-judge: Personalized Alignment of Large Language Models via Token-level Self-judgment</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Xiaotian</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Zhang</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ruizhe</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Feng</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Zuozhu</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Liu</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2025-07</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Wanxiang</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Che</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Joyce</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Nabende</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ekaterina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Shutova</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Mohammad</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Taher</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Pilehvar</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Vienna, Austria</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-256-5</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>Aligning language models with human preferences presents significant challenges, particularly in achieving personalization without incurring excessive computational costs. Existing methods rely on reward signals and additional annotated data, limiting their scalability and adaptability to diverse human values. To address these challenges, we introduce Persona-judge, a novel discriminative paradigm that enables training-free personalized alignment with unseen preferences. Instead of optimizing policy parameters through external reward feedback, Persona-judge leverages the intrinsic preference judgment capabilities of the model. Specifically, a draft model generates candidate tokens conditioned on a given preference, while a judge model, embodying another preference, cross-validates the predicted tokens whether to be accepted. Experimental results demonstrate that Persona-judge, using the inherent preference evaluation mechanisms of the model, offers a scalable and computationally efficient solution to personalized alignment, paving the way for more adaptive customized alignment. Our code is available here.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">zhang-etal-2025-persona</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.260</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.260/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2025-07</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>5037</start>
<end>5049</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Persona-judge: Personalized Alignment of Large Language Models via Token-level Self-judgment
%A Zhang, Xiaotian
%A Chen, Ruizhe
%A Feng, Yang
%A Liu, Zuozhu
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-256-5
%F zhang-etal-2025-persona
%X Aligning language models with human preferences presents significant challenges, particularly in achieving personalization without incurring excessive computational costs. Existing methods rely on reward signals and additional annotated data, limiting their scalability and adaptability to diverse human values. To address these challenges, we introduce Persona-judge, a novel discriminative paradigm that enables training-free personalized alignment with unseen preferences. Instead of optimizing policy parameters through external reward feedback, Persona-judge leverages the intrinsic preference judgment capabilities of the model. Specifically, a draft model generates candidate tokens conditioned on a given preference, while a judge model, embodying another preference, cross-validates the predicted tokens whether to be accepted. Experimental results demonstrate that Persona-judge, using the inherent preference evaluation mechanisms of the model, offers a scalable and computationally efficient solution to personalized alignment, paving the way for more adaptive customized alignment. Our code is available here.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.260
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.260/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.260
%P 5037-5049
Markdown (Informal)
[Persona-judge: Personalized Alignment of Large Language Models via Token-level Self-judgment](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.260/) (Zhang et al., Findings 2025)
ACL