Reasoning-Enhanced Self-Training for Long-Form Personalized Text Generation
This addresses the challenge of aligning LLM outputs with user-specific context for personalized text generation, representing a strong specific gain in this domain.
The paper tackles the problem of personalized long-form text generation by proposing REST-PG, a framework that trains LLMs to reason over personal data, resulting in an average relative performance gain of 14.5% on the LongLaMP benchmark.
Personalized text generation requires a unique ability of large language models (LLMs) to learn from context that they often do not encounter during their standard training. One way to encourage LLMs to better use personalized context for generating outputs that better align with the user's expectations is to instruct them to reason over the user's past preferences, background knowledge, or writing style. To achieve this, we propose Reasoning-Enhanced Self-Training for Personalized Text Generation (REST-PG), a framework that trains LLMs to reason over personal data during response generation. REST-PG first generates reasoning paths to train the LLM's reasoning abilities and then employs Expectation-Maximization Reinforced Self-Training to iteratively train the LLM based on its own high-reward outputs. We evaluate REST-PG on the LongLaMP benchmark, consisting of four diverse personalized long-form text generation tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that REST-PG achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines, with an average relative performance gain of 14.5% on the benchmark.