Beyond Preference Following: Benchmarking Profile-Query Arbitration in Personalized Text Transformation

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Writing assistants use persistent preferences to personalize responses, but these can conflict with the current request. Responses can meet every requirement yet serve the task poorly, while task failures need not involve following a conflicting preference. We introduce Profile Conflict Arbitration (PCA-Bench), a benchmark of 64 rewriting tasks and 256 task-preference pairs. We construct these pairs by varying the profile preference for each fixed text and request, covering different relations between the preference and the request. We assess whether responses meet requirements, how well they achieve the request's goals, and whether they follow preferences. Across three LLMs, we find that when preferences compete with task goals, a higher success rate in meeting both requirements and preferences does not mean better responses: it can come with a greater quality loss compared with responses without a profile. Similar rates of preference following do not imply the same ability to meet the current task's requirements when preferences conflict with them.