PerSPL: Personalized Semi-supervised Preference Learning

Xiaoan Xu, Tingzhou Wei, Juncheng Dong, Korel Gundem, Ethan X. Fang +1

Personalized reward models require user-specific preference comparisons, but collecting such feedback is costly and provides only limited supervision for each user. At the same time, large pools of responses can be generated without user identities or preference labels, yet existing personalized reward models leave this data unused. Directly learning from these responses is difficult because pairwise objectives constrain relative scores within a prompt, whereas pseudo-labeling individual responses requires scores that are comparable across prompts for the same user. We propose \textbf{PerSPL} (Personalized Semi-supervised Preference Learning), a backbone-agnostic framework that uses pair-mean score centering to stabilize this cross-prompt score coordinate and iteratively turns unlabeled responses into user-specific training signals. Against seven representative baselines across four benchmarks---PersonalLLM, HelpSteer2, Reddit TLDR, and Chatbot Arena---PerSPL achieves the highest reported mean accuracy among the evaluated methods for both seen and unseen users. The two latter benchmarks provide real-user preference comparisons in summarization and open-domain chatbot interaction,…