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Poster
in
Workshop: Workshop on Behavioral Machine Learning

CoS: Enhancing Personalization with Context Steering

Sashrika Pandey · Jerry He · Mariah Schrum · Anca Dragan


Abstract:

When querying a large language model (LLM), the context, i.e. personal, demographic, and cultural information specific to an end-user, can significantly shape the response of the LLM. For example, asking the model to explain Newton's second law with the context "I am a toddler" yields a different answer compared to the context "I am a physics professor.'' Proper usage of the context enables the LLM to generate personalized responses, whereas inappropriate contextual influence can lead to stereotypical and potentially harmful generations (e.g. associating "female" with "housekeeper"). In practice, striking the right balance when leveraging context is a nuanced and challenging problem that is often situation-dependent. One common approach to address this challenge is to fine-tune LLMs on contextually appropriate responses. However, this approach is expensive, time-consuming, and not controllable for end-users in different situations. In this work, we propose Context Steering (CoS) - a simple training-free method that can be easily applied to autoregressive LLMs at inference time. By measuring the contextual influence in terms of token prediction likelihood and modulating it, our method enables practitioners to determine the appropriate level of contextual influence based on their specific use case and end-user base. We showcase using CoS to amplify contextual influence to achieve better personalization in a controllable manner.

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