Meet Dynamic Individual Preferences: Resolving Conflicting Human Value with Paired Fine-Tuning

arXiv cs.CL / 4/15/2026

💬 OpinionIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper proposes “Preference-Paired Fine-Tuning (PFT)” to personalize LLMs for individuals whose preferences are diverse, contradictory, and change over time.
  • It introduces a new evaluation dataset, “Value Conflict Dilemma (VCD),” containing scenarios with conflicting human preferences to test how well models handle trade-offs.
  • Experiments show PFT improves performance over single-preference training and beats methods including DPO and SFT, reaching up to 96.6% accuracy on multi-choice classification and an open-ended generation score of 8.69.
  • With limited user history, PFT can infer a user-specific preference vector quickly and yields a 44.76% improvement in alignment versus single-preference models.
  • Overall, the work frames preference personalization as a structured fine-tuning problem using paired preference signals to resolve conflicts.

Abstract

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the alignment of models with general human preferences. However, a major challenge remains in adapting LLMs to individual preferences, which are not only diverse but also dynamic. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, Preference-Paired Fine-Tuning (PFT), designed to align models with contradictory and evolving individual preferences. We present a new dataset, Value Conflict Dilemma (VCD), which includes scenarios that involve conflicting human preferences, facilitating the evaluation of our approach. Our experiments demonstrate that PFT outperforms single-preference training methods, achieving up to 96.6% accuracy in multi-choice classification tasks and the highest open-ended generation score of 8.69. PFT also shows significant improvements over DPO, SFT and some traditional training methods, especially when handling conflicting preferences. Additionally, with limited user history data, models can inferring preference vector rapidly, achieving a 44.76% improvement in user-specific preference alignment in comparison to single-preference models.