Test-Time User Alignment via Bayesian Population Guidance in Subjective Tasks

Abstract

In subjective tasks, different individuals can have different correct answers for the same input—the ground truth is not fixed but rather determined by each user's personal perspective. Standard foundation models suppress this individual variation by producing population-averaged predictions; conversely, few-shot in-context learning (ICL) struggles to capture user-specific preferences from limited demonstrations. To address this limitation, we propose Population-Guided Bayesian Calibration (PGBC), a test-time personalization method that applies Bayesian inference to foundation model outputs for user-specific alignment. Unlike ICL methods that rely on the model to implicitly infer preferences from examples, PGBC explicitly quantifies each individual's deviation from the population distribution and incorporates this into prediction with minimal feedback (K < 10). Experiments on three subjective benchmark datasets across four foundation models demonstrate that PGBC significantly outperforms zero-shot baselines with a large effect size (Cohen's d = 1.21), and the improvement over ICL approaches is even more pronounced (d = 1.40). Furthermore, user-level distribution analysis reveals that PGBC aligns predictions with individual preferences when zero-shot baselines exhibit substantial bias, while ICL methods increase distributional mismatch. Our results show that PGBC enables practical deployment in cold-start scenarios where minimal user feedback must yield maximal personalization.