---
license: apache-2.0
task_categories:
  - text-generation
  - text-classification
language:
  - en
tags:
  - personalization
  - user-profiles
  - persona
  - recommendation
pretty_name: Behaviorally Grounded User Profiles
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
configs:
  - config_name: open_ended
    data_files: open_ended_profiles.csv
    default: true
  - config_name: synthetic_baseline
    data_files: synthetic_baseline_profiles.csv
---

# Behaviorally Grounded User Profiles from the Wild

Open-ended, anonymized user profiles distilled from authentic social-media behavior, released with the paper
**"Behaviorally Grounded User Profiles from the Wild for Personalized Alignment and Multi-Perspective Reasoning."**

Persona-driven methods for personalizing LLMs typically rely on rigid synthetic personas built from a small set of
categorical attributes (age, gender, nationality). These flatten individual variation and lean on stereotypes. This
dataset instead provides **open-ended profiles extracted from real behavioral traces**: short, coherent textual bios
synthesized from users' historical social-media posts. Alongside them we release a **synthetic baseline** generated by
prompting an LLM, so the two can be compared directly.

## How the data was created

![Profile synthesis pipeline](assets/figure2_pipeline.png)

## Dataset structure

Two configurations, each a CSV with the same schema:

| Column         | Type   | Description                                                        |
| -------------- | ------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| `user_id`      | string | Pseudonymous random UUID; no real handle |
| `user_profile` | string | A short free-text bio describing the user's interests and traits   |

| Config               | File                             | Rows | Description                                                             |
| -------------------- | -------------------------------- | ---- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `open_ended`         | `open_ended_profiles.csv`        | 824  | Behaviorally grounded profiles extracted from real Bluesky post histories |
| `synthetic_baseline` | `synthetic_baseline_profiles.csv`| 842  | Purely synthetic profiles from LLM prompting |

Open-ended profiles average ~116 words; synthetic baseline profiles ~210 words.

### Example (open-ended)

```json
{
  "user_id": "5078790f-63fe-4d2a-a116-60ec37c17263",
  "user_profile": "The person is a nature-loving individual who enjoys flowers, music, and a wide variety of foods, with a particular fondness for chicken."
}
```

## Results

Downstream results for the Qwen3 models, comparing **No Profile** (base model), the **Synthetic** baseline, and our
**Open-Ended** behaviorally grounded profiles. RecBench columns (Netflix, Books, News) report F1; URS columns
(Leisure, Creativity, Advice, Avg.) report the 1–10 LLM-judge score. Higher is better; **bold** = best per column
within each model. (Full results with additional models are in the paper and the accompanying code repository.)

| Model | Variant | Netflix (F1) | Books (F1) | News (F1) | Leisure | Creativity | Advice | Avg. |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Qwen3-8B  | No Profile | 0.421 | 0.515 | 0.318 | 5.48 | 5.31 | 5.99 | 5.59 |
|           | Synthetic  | 0.420 | 0.625 | 0.319 | 6.34 | 6.72 | 7.08 | 6.72 |
|           | Open-Ended | **0.450** | **0.649** | **0.322** | **6.76** | **7.40** | **7.65** | **7.27** |
| Qwen3-14B | No Profile | 0.419 | 0.308 | 0.303 | **7.49** | 7.90 | 8.06 | 7.82 |
|           | Synthetic  | 0.416 | 0.538 | **0.327** | 7.06 | 7.54 | 7.91 | 7.50 |
|           | Open-Ended | **0.459** | **0.632** | 0.321 | 7.29 | **8.10** | **8.27** | **7.88** |
| Qwen3-32B | No Profile | 0.403 | 0.569 | 0.308 | 6.79 | 7.09 | 6.90 | 6.93 |
|           | Synthetic  | 0.427 | 0.580 | **0.317** | 7.20 | 7.87 | 8.06 | 7.71 |
|           | Open-Ended | **0.455** | **0.658** | 0.315 | **7.35** | **8.06** | **8.23** | **7.88** |

## Profile diversity

![Birth-location distribution: synthetic baseline (left) vs open-ended (right)](assets/figure3_birth_distribution.png)

*Birth-location distribution of the **baseline synthetic** profiles (left) and our **open-ended** behaviorally
grounded profiles (right). Synthetic personas collapse toward a narrow set of nationalities, while the open-ended
profiles maintain a long-tailed, representative distribution (top-12 countries shown; see the paper for the full
comparison and categorical entropy analysis).*

## Source data & licensing

Profiles are derived from the public [**"2 Million Bluesky Posts"**](https://huggingface.co/datasets/alpindale/two-million-bluesky-posts) corpus, released under **Apache 2.0**.
Collection followed the platform's Terms of Service and API guidelines. This derived dataset is released under
**Apache 2.0**.


## Citation

```bibtex
@inproceedings{behaviorally_grounded_profiles,
  title     = {Behaviorally Grounded User Profiles from the Wild for Personalized Alignment and Multi-Perspective Reasoning},
  author    = {PLACEHOLDER},
  booktitle = {PLACEHOLDER},
  year      = {2026}
}
```

Please also cite the source corpus (Alpin Dale, "2 Million Bluesky Posts", 2024).