PrefPalette: Personalized Preference Modeling with Latent Attributes
Authors: name: Shuyue Stella Li; name: Melanie Sclar; name: Hunter Lang; name: Ansong Ni; name: Jacqueline He; name: Puxin Xu; name: Andrew Cohen; name: Chan Young Park; name: Yulia Tsvetkov; name: Asli Celikyilmaz
Published: 2025-07-17 21:21:54

Abstract: Personalizing AI systems requires understanding not just what users prefer,
but the reasons that underlie those preferences - yet current preference models
typically treat human judgment as a black box. We introduce PrefPalette, a
framework that decomposes preferences into attribute dimensions and tailors its
preference prediction to distinct social community values in a
human-interpretable manner. PrefPalette operationalizes a cognitive science
principle known as multi-attribute decision making in two ways: (1) a scalable
counterfactual attribute synthesis step that involves generating synthetic
training data to isolate for individual attribute effects (e.g., formality,
humor, cultural values), and (2) attention-based preference modeling that
learns how different social communities dynamically weight these attributes.
This approach moves beyond aggregate preference modeling to capture the diverse
evaluation frameworks that drive human judgment. When evaluated on 45 social
communities from the online platform Reddit, PrefPalette outperforms GPT-4o by
46.6% in average prediction accuracy. Beyond raw predictive improvements,
PrefPalette also shed light on intuitive, community-specific profiles:
scholarly communities prioritize verbosity and stimulation, conflict-oriented
communities value sarcasm and directness, and support-based communities
emphasize empathy. By modeling the attribute-mediated structure of human
judgment, PrefPalette delivers both superior preference modeling and
transparent, interpretable insights, and serves as a first step toward more
trustworthy, value-aware personalized applications.