Personalized Language Models via Privacy-Preserving Evolutionary Model Merging

Abstract: Personalization in large language models (LLMs) seeks to tailor models to individual user or user group preferences. Prompt-based methods augment queries with user preference information, whereas training-based methods directly encode preferences into model parameters for more effective personalization. Despite achieving some success in personalizing LLMs, prior methods often fail to directly optimize task-specific metrics and lack explicit privacy-preservation mechanisms. To address these limitations, we propose Privacy-Preserving Model Merging via Evolutionary Algorithms (PriME), a novel approach to personalization that employs gradient-free methods to directly optimize task-specific metrics while preserving user privacy. By incorporating privacy preservation into optimization, PriME produces a personalized module that effectively captures the target user's preferences while minimizing the privacy risks for the users sharing their private information. Experiments on the LaMP benchmark show that PriME outperforms both prompt-based and training-based methods, achieving up to a 45% performance improvement over the prior art. Further analysis shows that PriME achieves a significantly better privacy-utility trade-off, highlighting the potential of evolutionary approaches for privacy-preserving LLM personalization.