Abstract
User preferences shift as needs, context, and tastes evolve. This matters for personalized recommendation, LLM response generation, and RLHF-trained reward models, which can become miscalibrated as preferences drift. Existing non-stationary bandit methods forget uniformly across all dimensions, but real preference shifts are typically partial: some dimensions go stale while others remain valid. Neural contextual bandits accumulate confidence monotonically via the Gram matrix, with no mechanism to direct uncertainty where predictions have gone wrong. We propose PEARL (Prediction Error-Adaptive Regularized Learning), which reverses the Gram update along feature directions where predictions are surprisingly wrong, while leaving confidence intact elsewhere. We prove that (i) any non-adaptive policy suffers linear regret after a preference shift, (ii) no fixed exploration rate achieves low regret in both stationary and non-stationary regimes, and (iii) PEARL's cumulative regret scales with the number of shifted users N_s, not the total population N. On PRISM, a personalized LLM response selection benchmark (1,500 users, 21 LLMs), PEARL beats greedy by +4.0 points and the best neural bandit baseline by +2.5 points (p<0.001), while performing on par with greedy when preferences are stable. It beats sliding-window and discounted approaches by 3 to 10 points, showing that selective forgetting outperforms uniform forgetting. The selection policy is a ~100K-parameter MLP that runs in milliseconds on CPU, leaves LLM weights frozen, and works with any API-based model.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05842
