From Empathy to Personalized Empathy: Adapting Empathetic Strategies to Individual Users

2026-05-30

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge that current large language models struggle to dynamically adapt their empathetic strategies according to user personality during extended interactions. It introduces, for the first time, the task of personalized empathy and presents PersonaEmp, a novel dataset integrating user interaction history, personality traits, and empathy requests. To tackle this task, the authors propose the PereGRM framework, which enables adaptive optimization of empathetic responses through user profiling grounded in historical interactions, structured empathy evaluation, and dynamic reward generation. Experimental results demonstrate that PereGRM significantly outperforms existing approaches across multiple evaluation metrics, effectively enhancing the model’s capacity for personalized empathy.

Abstract

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in long-term interactions with users, empathy has become an increasingly important capability. However, existing research overlooks the influence of users' personality traits on empathetic strategies during long-term interactions. To address this gap, we introduce the task of personalized empathy, which focuses on adapting empathetic strategies according to users' personalized characteristics derived from history. To study and enhance this capability, we construct PersonaEmp, a personalized empathy dataset built from long-term user-AI interactions, featuring rich user histories, persona information, and empathy-seeking queries. We further propose PereGRM, a reward modeling framework that combines the empathy evaluation structure with dynamic evaluation criteria generation for fine-grained reward modeling. Experimental results across different settings and multiple judge models show that PereGRM consistently achieves the strongest performance improvements, indicating its effectiveness for enhancing personalized empathetic capabilities.

Problem

• personalized empathy
• personality traits
• empathetic strategies
• long-term interactions
• Large Language Models

Innovation

• personalized empathy
• reward modeling
• Large Language Models
• user personality
• long-term interaction