Demonstration venue · read-only. Every page can be browsed; the buttons that would change it are switched off. Create an account to run TaxoReview on your own data. A simulation from public publication records: the people listed were not invited and did not agree to review.
? Tutorial for this page

NeurPIU: Neurobiologically Inspired Personalized Intent Understanding in Large Language Models

sigir26-069 · Full research paper · Zenghua Liao, Jinzhi Liao, Xiang Hui Zhao
Conversational Search and Retrieval · 50% User Profile and Persona Modeling · 25% Personalized LLM Adaptation · 25%
Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) excel when user goals are clearly specified, yet real-world queries are often vague and evolving, forcing LLMs to guess and leading to misaligned responses. Existing approaches attempt to clarify user intents through iterative questioning. While effective in alleviating disambiguation, this paradigm tends to merely provide standard and normal responses, which fails to meet the growing demand for diverse personalized expression of users. Based on the observation, we first identify its problem as the ignore of users' mental states, in which the complicated mental elements, unclear functional rules, and evolving mental states pose obstacles to approach the problem. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the theory of the mentalizing network in the human brain and propose a neurobiologically inspired framework, i.e., NeurPIU, that endows LLMs with human-like mentalizing capabilities for personalized intent understanding. NeurPIU constructs an intent neural network that organizes users' long-term mental states into a three-layer graph; retrieves query-relevant states via spreading activation mechanism with temporal decay; and injects an encoded cognitive prefix into a frozen LLM through a lightweight LoRA-based cognitive model to guide response generation. The network is incrementally updated after each interaction to track evolving user cognition. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that NeurPIU consistently improves long-term dialogue quality, especially its plug-and-play feature, and generalizes to conversational recommendation and mental health counseling. A user study with physiological measurements further indicates that NeurPIU reduces interaction time by 53.95% while improving user experience ratings by 22.38%. All data and code are released.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Yujia Zhou 0002
47
85 Cognitive Personalized Search Integrating Large Language Models with an Efficient Memory Mechanism (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval
62 Incorporating Explicit Subtopics in Personalized Search (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction
62 Intent-Oriented Dynamic Interest Modeling for Personalized Web Search (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction
2 Gustavo Penha
46
66 Pairwise Review-Based Explanations for Voice Product Search (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval
66 On the Calibration and Uncertainty of Neural Learning to Rank Models for Conversational Search (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval
63 What does BERT know about books, movies and music? Probing BERT for Conversational Recommendation (2020) Conversational Recommendation Systems

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Kam-Fai Wong 61
Area-chair candidates (10)
Kam-Fai Wong assigned 616 papers
Hongjin Qian 5012 papers
Jun Xu 0001 462 papers
Chenyan Xiong 4415 papers
Ziyi Ye 4414 papers
Pengyue Jia 4410 papers
Xiaoxi Li 0005 4115 papers
Yi R. Fung 0001 4110 papers
Zhijing Wu 0001 409 papers
Kun Gai 405 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
2 Yang Zhang 0072 51 3
68 LLM Personalization: Foundations, Breakthroughs, and Frontiers (2026) User Profile and Persona Modeling
55 Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation
4 Wenlin Zhang 0001 47 3
62 Bridging Personalization and AI: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG
62 A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG
5 Yujia Zhou 0002 assigned 47 3
85 Cognitive Personalized Search Integrating Large Language Models with an Efficient Memory Mechanism (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval
62 Incorporating Explicit Subtopics in Personalized Search (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction
6 Chongming Gao 47 3
57 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling
55 Don't Start Over: A Cost-Effective Framework for Migrating Personalized Prompts Between LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment
7 Jialong Wu 0007 46 3
66 AdaRewriter: Unleashing the Power of Prompting-based Conversational Query Reformulation via Test-Time Adaptation (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion
66 AdaCQR: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search via Sparse and Dense Retrieval Alignment (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion
8 Weiwei Sun 0001 46 3
68 DukeNet: A Dual Knowledge Interaction Network for Knowledge-Grounded Conversation (2020) Conversational Search and Retrieval
68 Simulating User Satisfaction for the Evaluation of Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval
9 Gustavo Penha assigned 46 3
66 Pairwise Review-Based Explanations for Voice Product Search (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval
66 On the Calibration and Uncertainty of Neural Learning to Rank Models for Conversational Search (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval
11 Idan Szpektor 45 3
70 I want to answer; who has a question?: Yahoo! answers recommender system (2011) Conversational and Interactive Recommendation
70 When relevance is not enough: promoting diversity and freshnessin personalized question recommendation (2013) Conversational and Interactive Recommendation
12 Junjie Zhang 0009 45 3
55 Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation
54 STARec: An Efficient Agent Framework for Recommender Systems via Autonomous Deliberate Reasoning (2025) RL Training of Search Agents
16 Zhe Xu 0009 44 3
68 Dynamic Demonstration Retrieval and Cognitive Understanding for Emotional Support Conversation (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval
68 Intent-driven In-context Learning for Few-shot Dialogue State Tracking (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval
17 Sheng-Chieh Lin 43 3
68 Contextualized Query Embeddings for Conversational Search (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval
68 Multi-Stage Conversational Passage Retrieval: An Approach to Fusing Term Importance Estimation and Neural Query Rewriting (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval
18 Huifeng Guo 43 3
67 Prompt Tuning as User Inherent Profile Inference Machine (2025) Efficiency and Deployment
63 Personalize Before Retrieve: LLM-based Personalized Query Expansion for User-Centric Retrieval (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG
19 Yingyi Zhang 0001 43 3
62 Bridging Personalization and AI: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG
62 A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent (2026) Personalized and Conversational RAG
20 Corby Rosset 43 3
69 Zero-shot Clarifying Question Generation for Conversational Search (2023) Conversational and Session Search
68 Contextual Re-Ranking with Behavior Aware Transformers (2020) Conversational Search and Retrieval
21 Jinheon Baek 42 3
87 Knowledge-Augmented Large Language Models for Personalized Contextual Query Suggestion (2024) Conversational Search and Retrieval
63 Realistic Conversational Question Answering with Answer Selection based on Calibrated Confidence and Uncertainty Measurement (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval
22 Liwei Wang 0009 42 3
68 RAST: Domain-Robust Dialogue Rewriting as Sequence Tagging (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval
66 Eliciting Knowledge from Large Pre-Trained Models for Unsupervised Knowledge-Grounded Conversation (2022) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
23 Weizhou Shen 42 3
68 Generic Dependency Modeling for Multi-Party Conversation (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval
63 Multi-Grained Knowledge Retrieval for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval
24 Adam Jatowt 42 3
66 Search Intent Discovery by Structurization of Community QA Contents (2012) Query Reformulation and Expansion
40 BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking
25 Nancy F. Chen 42 3
68 Prompter: Zero-shot Adaptive Prefixes for Dialogue State Tracking Domain Adaptation (2023) Conversational Search and Retrieval
66 Multimodal Dialogue State Tracking (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval
26 Jizhi Zhang 41 3
57 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling
42 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization
27 Xiao Zhang 0034 41 3
58 Similarity = Value? Consultation Value-Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search (2025) Personalized and Context-Aware Retrieval
48 Retrieval Augmented Generation with Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Text Generation (2025) Personalized and Conversational RAG
28 Yupeng Hou 41 3
55 Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation
41 Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems (2024) Efficiency and Deployment
30 Wonduk Seo 41 3
66 A New Query Expansion Approach for Enhancing Information Retrieval via Agent-Mediated Dialogic Inquiry (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion
32 SPIO: Ensemble and Selective Strategies via LLM-Based Multi-Agent Planning in Automated Data Science (2026) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
31 Di Wu 0054 41 3
69 LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory (2025) Conversational Search and Retrieval
36 VisRet: Visualization Improves Knowledge-Intensive Text-to-Image Retrieval (2026) Multimodal and Graph RAG
33 Jiancan Wu 40 3
56 Customizing Language Models with Instance-wise LoRA for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation
51 Let Me Do It For You: Towards LLM Empowered Recommendation via Tool Learning (2024) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
34 Zhengyi Yang 0007 40 3
44 LLaRA: Large Language-Recommendation Assistant (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation
42 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization
37 Bo Chen 0023 40 3
54 ELCoRec: Enhance Language Understanding with Co-Propagation of Numerical and Categorical Features for Recommendation (2024) LLM-Collaborative Filtering Integration
44 LLM4Tag: Automatic Tagging System for Information Retrieval via Large Language Models (2025) Domain-Specific and Structured Retrieval
39 Keqin Bao 40 3
57 Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation (2025) User Profile and Persona Modeling
42 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization
40 Han Li 0005 40 3
48 Retrieval Augmented Generation with Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Text Generation (2025) Personalized and Conversational RAG
42 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation