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# UPH: User Prior Head — Experiment Results
**Method**: `h'_t = h_t + alpha * U * theta_u` (static user-specific bias on frozen LLM hidden states)
**Model**: Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct
**Benchmark**: LongLaMP (Review Writing + Topic Writing, user + temporal settings)
**Decode policy**: Greedy, min_new_tokens=128, max_new_tokens=512, blend_gamma=0.5
**Support budget**: K=4, d=64, alpha=0.1, beta=0.05, 30 adaptation steps
**Per-user state**: 128 bytes (64-dim bf16 vector), 0 personalization prompt tokens at inference
---
## Main Table (N=200 per setting, fair decode policy)
### Review Writing
| Method | Setting | ROUGE-1 | ROUGE-L | METEOR | SFD_-len | Len |
|--------|---------|---------|---------|--------|----------|-----|
| Base | user | 0.2697 | 0.1258 | 0.1549 | 0.9826 | 161 |
| Prompt-All-K | user | 0.2992 | 0.1417 | 0.1949 | 0.6690 | 230 |
| BM25-Top1 | user | 0.3055 | 0.1399 | 0.1950 | 0.6922 | 222 |
| **UPH (ours)** | **user** | 0.2747 | **0.1399** | 0.1491 | 0.9140 | 143 |
| CVH (ablation) | user | 0.2670 | 0.1377 | 0.1463 | 0.9287 | 144 |
| Base | temporal | 0.2639 | 0.1223 | 0.1564 | 1.4010 | 161 |
| Prompt-All-K | temporal | 0.2949 | 0.1422 | 0.1928 | 0.6971 | 222 |
| BM25-Top1 | temporal | 0.3001 | 0.1394 | 0.1940 | 0.7087 | 211 |
| **UPH (ours)** | **temporal** | 0.2747 | **0.1383** | 0.1513 | 1.3228 | 140 |
| CVH (ablation) | temporal | 0.2713 | 0.1369 | 0.1489 | 0.8851 | 135 |
### Topic Writing
| Method | Setting | ROUGE-1 | ROUGE-L | METEOR | SFD_-len | Len |
|--------|---------|---------|---------|--------|----------|-----|
| Base | user | 0.2911 | 0.1193 | 0.2044 | 0.9684 | 245 |
| Prompt-All-K | user | 0.2582 | 0.1229 | 0.1852 | 0.8731 | 233 |
| BM25-Top1 | user | 0.2604 | 0.1194 | 0.1857 | 0.8919 | 227 |
| **UPH (ours)** | **user** | 0.2723 | **0.1321** | 0.1920 | 0.9548 | 256 |
| CVH (ablation) | user | 0.2739 | 0.1303 | 0.1923 | 0.9598 | 249 |
| Base | temporal | 0.2898 | 0.1225 | 0.2100 | 1.0385 | 246 |
| Prompt-All-K | temporal | 0.2668 | 0.1291 | 0.1982 | 0.8360 | 249 |
| BM25-Top1 | temporal | 0.2546 | 0.1182 | 0.1875 | 0.8657 | 232 |
| **UPH (ours)** | **temporal** | 0.2793 | **0.1342** | 0.2043 | 1.0749 | 259 |
| CVH (ablation) | temporal | 0.2733 | 0.1333 | 0.1995 | 1.0363 | 251 |
---
## UPH ROUGE-L Relative Improvement over Base
| Task | Setting | Base R-L | UPH R-L | Delta | Rel. Improve |
|------|---------|----------|---------|-------|-------------|
| Review | user | 0.1258 | 0.1399 | +0.0141 | **+11.2%** |
| Review | temporal | 0.1223 | 0.1383 | +0.0160 | **+13.1%** |
| Topic | user | 0.1193 | 0.1321 | +0.0128 | **+10.7%** |
| Topic | temporal | 0.1225 | 0.1342 | +0.0117 | **+9.6%** |
**Average: ~11.1% ROUGE-L improvement across all 4 settings with 0 inference prompt tokens.**
---
## UPH vs Text Baselines: Key Comparison
### Review Writing
- UPH R-L **matches** BM25-Top1 (0.1399 = 0.1399 user; 0.1383 vs 0.1394 temporal)
- UPH METEOR is lower (0.1491 vs 0.1950) — semantic coverage gap remains
- UPH uses 0 prompt tokens vs ~300 for BM25
### Topic Writing
- UPH R-L **exceeds** all text baselines (0.1321 vs 0.1229/0.1194 user; 0.1342 vs 0.1291/0.1182 temporal)
- UPH METEOR **exceeds** text baselines (0.1920 vs 0.1852/0.1857 user; 0.2043 vs 0.1982/0.1875 temporal)
- Text exemplars hurt on Topic: BM25 barely helps or hurts R-L; METEOR drops from Base
- Key insight: **UPH is more robust than textual exemplars when support-query mismatch is high**
---
## Feature-Level Style Analysis (Review, user setting)
Delta = generated - user_prototype (closer to 0 = better):
| Feature | Base | Prompt-All-K | BM25 | UPH | CVH |
|---------|------|--------------|------|-----|-----|
| length | -170.6 | -95.1 | -102.1 | -190.9 | -188.1 |
| avg_sent_len | -1.84 | -0.78 | -1.41 | -1.21 | -1.30 |
| **TTR** | 0.178 | 0.090 | 0.101 | **0.041** | 0.040 |
| newline_rate | -0.068 | 0.068 | 0.065 | -0.232 | -0.228 |
| exclaim_rate | 0.102 | -0.021 | 0.001 | 0.066 | 0.084 |
| **first_person** | -0.008 | -0.011 | -0.009 | **-0.004** | -0.004 |
| **adj_adv_rate** | 0.012 | 0.004 | 0.006 | **0.000** | 0.000 |
| sentiment | 0.007 | -0.001 | 0.001 | 0.009 | 0.010 |
**UPH excels at lexical-style features** (TTR, first_person, adj_adv_rate) but not formatting features (length, newline_rate).
---
## Theta Representational Analysis (Review user, N=200)
### RSA (Representational Similarity Analysis)
- **rho_all = 0.0201** (p = 4.5e-3) — weak but significant
- **rho_-len/newline = 0.0808** (p = 3.7e-30) — 4x stronger after removing length/newline
- Interpretation: theta space aligns with lexical-style structure, not formatting structure
### Self-Consistency (same user, different support subsets)
- avg cos(theta_a, theta_b) same user: **0.3706**
- avg cos(theta_a, theta_b) different users: **0.0278**
- **Delta_self = 0.3428** — very strong user-specificity
- Interpretation: theta is a **stable user-specific state**, not optimization noise
### Ridge Probe (R^2 for predicting style features from theta)
- All R^2 = 0.0 — theta-to-style mapping is nonlinear
- theta operates in a 64-dim subspace of 1536-dim hidden space; 8 surface style features are not linearly recoverable
### Cross-task Theta Analysis Comparison
| Metric | Review (user) | Topic (user) |
|--------|--------------|-------------|
| rho_all | 0.0201 (p=4.5e-3) | 0.0262 (p=2.2e-4) |
| rho_-len/newline | **0.0808** (p=3.7e-30) | 0.0163 (p=2.2e-2) |
| Delta_self | **0.3428** | **0.2079** |
| R^2 (all probes) | 0.0 | 0.0 |
- **Self-consistency holds on both tasks**: Delta_self = 0.34 (Review), 0.21 (Topic). Both strongly positive.
- **RSA stronger on Review**: rho_-len/newline = 0.08 vs 0.02. Review theta space more aligned with lexical style.
- Topic theta is still user-specific (Delta_self=0.21) but less style-aligned in RSA.
---
## CVH Negative Ablation
CVH (Contextual Vector Head): `h'_t = h_t + alpha * B(theta ⊙ (A @ h_t))`
CVH is **strictly worse than UPH on all metrics across all 4 settings**:
| Setting | UPH R-L | CVH R-L | Gap |
|---------|---------|---------|-----|
| Review user | 0.1399 | 0.1377 | -0.0022 |
| Review temporal | 0.1383 | 0.1369 | -0.0014 |
| Topic user | 0.1321 | 0.1303 | -0.0018 |
| Topic temporal | 0.1342 | 0.1333 | -0.0009 |
**Root cause**: CVH's multiplicative gating `theta ⊙ (A @ h)` is brittle under support-query distribution shift. The learned theta activations don't transfer well from support hidden states to query hidden states. UPH's static bias `U @ theta` is more robust because it doesn't depend on the current hidden state.
### Support-Query Shift Correlation (Review user, N=100)
- Mean support-query cosine similarity: **0.9449** (hidden states are quite aligned on average)
- Spearman(shift_cos, CVH-UPH delta): **rho = -0.026, p = 0.79** — no significant correlation
- **Bin analysis**:
- High-alignment (cos >= 0.952): UPH 0.1425, CVH 0.1415 — gap = 0.001
- Low-alignment (cos < 0.952): UPH 0.1392, CVH 0.1348 — gap = 0.0044
- **Interpretation**: The overall shift correlation is not significant (p=0.79), but the bin analysis shows a directionally consistent pattern: **CVH's disadvantage widens when support-query alignment is low** (gap 0.0044 vs 0.001). The lack of significance is likely because hidden states are highly aligned on average (cos~0.95), leaving limited variance to detect the effect.
---
## Efficiency
| Metric | UPH | Prompt-All-K | BM25-Top1 |
|--------|-----|-------------|-----------|
| Per-user state | 128 bytes | N/A | N/A |
| Inference prompt tokens | **0** | ~800-1200 | ~200-300 |
| Adaptation time | ~7s/user | N/A | N/A |
| Compression ratio | ~50x | 1x | 1x |
---
## Hyperparameters
| Parameter | Value |
|-----------|-------|
| d (theta dimension) | 64 |
| alpha (scaling) | 0.1 |
| beta (KL weight) | 0.05 |
| lambda (L2 weight) | 1e-4 |
| lr | 0.05 |
| Adaptation steps | 30 |
| Theta norm clip | 5.0 |
| K (support budget) | 4 |
| Basis seed | 42 |
| blend_gamma | 0.5 |
| min_new_tokens | 128 |
| B scaling | 1/sqrt(d) |
| A scaling | 1/sqrt(H) |
---
## Paper Narrative
**Title direction**: *One User Vector as a Robust Generation Prior for Memory-Free Personalization of Frozen LLMs*
**Core claims**:
1. A single 128-byte user vector improves ROUGE-L by ~11% across 2 tasks x 2 settings with 0 inference prompt tokens
2. On Topic Writing (high support-query mismatch), UPH exceeds text-based personalization baselines
3. Query-conditioned multiplicative gating (CVH) is less robust than static user prior (UPH) under distribution shift
4. theta_u is a stable, user-specific generation prior (Delta_self = 0.34) that aligns with lexical-style structure (rho = 0.08)
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