NeurPIU: Neurobiologically Inspired Personalized Intent Understanding in Large Language Models
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
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (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 |
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| 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 chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Kam-Fai Wong | 61 |
Area-chair candidates (10)
| Kam-Fai Wong assigned | 61 | 6 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 50 | 12 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 46 | 2 papers | |
| Chenyan Xiong | 44 | 15 papers | |
| Ziyi Ye | 44 | 14 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 44 | 10 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 41 | 15 papers | |
| Yi R. Fung 0001 | 41 | 10 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 40 | 9 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 40 | 5 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |