Taxonomy / Steerable persona pluralism / Inferring the persona from the party's own judgments
Nobody states the persona; the system works it out from a handful of that party's own choices, so it can serve a group or an individual who has never described themselves. A module bolted onto an untouched base model predicts any group's preferences from a few of their comparisons supplied in context, meta-learned across many groups; a companion method fits an individual's weights over fine-grained attributes from a few of their comparative judgments rather than one scalar reward. Run as an audit instead of an adapter, the same idea extracts the weighting implicit in an organization's past decisions and asks whether a model reproduces that policy rather than merely reaching the same verdicts — and finds models resist taking on an organization's weighting of protected attributes, which marks where this channel stops working.
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Each concept is read twice: whether the approach carries it, and whether the approach's own sources claim it. A concept that is absent and was never claimed is a gap in the field rather than a failure of the work, and is marked out of scope.
Definition · John Griffiths, What Is Legal Pluralism? (1986)
Different communities' norms are genuinely in force at once — not one official rulebook plus tolerated deviations, but multiple living systems of rules side by side.
Analysis
The study takes seriously that different organizational contexts hold genuinely different standards — plurality as an empirical finding. But it documents the plural orders; it does not give them any standing in a system.
Definition · Conflict-of-laws tradition
When two communities' norms disagree about the same case, something must say which governs — and why. That stated rule is what separates real pluralism from mere fragmentation into disconnected groups.
Analysis
Divergence across contexts is measured; nothing is proposed to govern it.
Definition · J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859)
Accommodation of group differences has a limit stated in advance — classically Mill's harm principle: your practices are your business until they harm others. Without an enforced floor, pluralism collapses into "each group gets whatever it wants".
Analysis
Out of scope for a measurement study.
arXiv:2508.08509MethodBuilt
Adapts to an individual user from a handful of their comparative judgments, using in-context learning over a set of fine-grained attributes rather than a single scalar reward.
arXiv:2310.11523MethodBuilt
Adds an independent transformer module to a base LLM that predicts a group's preferences over the model's generations from a few examples given in context, meta-learned across several groups, and tested on adapting to US demographic groups, to countries and to individual users.
What existing systems were observed to do. These characterise the problem the approach addresses without introducing a mechanism.