From Profiles to Steering Vectors: Global Sparse Priors and Local Semantic Calibration for Personalized Text Generation

Abstract

Personalized text generation requires models to capture user-specific writing styles from historical data. Existing approaches based on retrieval, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, or activation steering either introduce inference and storage overhead or struggle to separate stylistic signals from semantic content. We propose GLASS, a training-free framework for personalized generation via Global-Local Activation Steering with Sparse priors. GLASS uses sparse autoencoders to extract a global user-style prior from historical responses and constructs local contrastive style vectors over clustered interaction scenarios. During inference, it jointly injects global and local vectors into different model layers, enabling context-aware personalization without retrieval or parameter updates. Experiments on LaMP and LongLaMP show that GLASS outperforms retrieval-, fine-tuning-, and steering-based baselines across ROUGE metrics and LLM-as-judge evaluations. Further analyses show that SAE-based representations are more robust to topic and length shifts, suggesting better disentanglement of stylistic information from semantic residue.