Research on Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently witnessed an increasing interest in extending the models’ context size to better capture dependencies within long documents. While benchmarks have been proposed to assess long-range abilities, existing efforts primarily considered generic tasks that are not necessarily aligned with real-world applications. In contrast, we propose a new benchmark for long-context LLMs focused on a practical meeting assistant scenario in which the long contexts consist of transcripts obtained by automatic speech recognition, presenting unique challenges for LLMs due to the inherent noisiness and oral nature of such data. Our benchmark, ELITR-Bench, augments the existing ELITR corpus by adding 271 manually crafted questions with their ground-truth answers, as well as noisy versions of meeting transcripts altered to target different Word Error Rate levels. Our experiments with 12 long-context LLMs on ELITR-Bench confirm the progress made across successive generations of both proprietary and open models, and point out their discrepancies in terms of robustness to transcript noise. We also provide a thorough analysis of our GPT-4-based evaluation, including insights from a crowdsourcing study. Our findings indicate that while GPT-4’s scores align with human judges, its ability to distinguish beyond three score levels may be limited.

LLM-powered conversational assistants are often deployed in a one-size-fits-all manner, which fails to accommodate individual user preferences. Recently, LLM personalization – tailoring models to align with specific user preferences – has gained increasing attention as a way to bridge this gap. In this work, we specifically focus on a practical yet challenging setting where only a small set of preference annotations can be collected per user – a problem we define as Personalized Preference Alignment with Limited Data (PPALLI). To support research in this area, we introduce two datasets – DnD and ELIP – and benchmark a variety of alignment techniques on them. We further propose FaST, a highly parameter-efficient approach that leverages high-level features automatically discovered from the data, achieving the best overall performance.

Personalized alignments towards individual users have been a long-standing goal in large language models (LLMs). We introduce Drift, a novel framework that personalizes LLMs at decoding time with implicit user preferences. Unlike traditional Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which relies on vast annotated datasets and expensive gradient updates, Drift operates in a training-free manner by steering a frozen LLM through few-shot preference modeling. Our approach represents user preferences as a composition of interpretable and predefined attributes, and employs a zero-shot rewarding mechanism based on contrastive system prompts. Experiments on both a synthetic persona dataset Perspective and a real human-annotated dataset PRISM demonstrate that Drift achieves performance comparable to standard RLHF methods while using only 50–100 examples. Our results show that Drift delivers not only computationally efficient but also interpretable personalization.