When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11000v1
• Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2026 05:20:10 GMT
• Title: When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs
• Authors: Zhongxiang Sun, Yi Zhan, Chenglei Shen, Weijie Yu, Xiao Zhang, Ming He, Jun Xu,
• Abstract summary: We show that when personalized large language models (LLMs) face factual queries, the model generates answers aligned with a user's prior history rather than the objective truth.<n>We propose Factuality-Preserving Personalized Steering (FPPS), a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions.
• Score: 13.695058536403108
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Personalized large language models (LLMs) adapt model behavior to individual users to enhance user satisfaction, yet personalization can inadvertently distort factual reasoning. We show that when personalized LLMs face factual queries, there exists a phenomenon where the model generates answers aligned with a user's prior history rather than the objective truth, resulting in personalization-induced hallucinations that degrade factual reliability and may propagate incorrect beliefs, due to representational entanglement between personalization and factual representations. To address this issue, we propose Factuality-Preserving Personalized Steering (FPPS), a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions while preserving personalized behavior. We further introduce PFQABench, the first benchmark designed to jointly evaluate factual and personalized question answering under personalization. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and personalization methods show that FPPS substantially improves factual accuracy while maintaining personalized performance.

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