The Personalization Paradox: Semantic Loss vs. Reasoning Gains in Agentic AI Q&A

TL;DR

This study investigates how personalization in agentic AI affects performance, revealing a trade-off between reasoning gains and semantic similarity, and highlights flaws in current evaluation metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework for personalized agentic AI, exposing limitations of existing metrics and demonstrating the nuanced effects of personalization.

Findings

Personalization improves reasoning and grounding metrics.

Current semantic metrics penalize meaningful personalized deviations.

Personalized configurations yield the highest overall system gains.

Abstract

AIVisor, an agentic retrieval-augmented LLM for student advising, was used to examine how personalization affects system performance across multiple evaluation dimensions. Using twelve authentic advising questions intentionally designed to stress lexical precision, we compared ten personalized and non-personalized system configurations and analyzed outcomes with a Linear Mixed-Effects Model across lexical (BLEU, ROUGE-L), semantic (METEOR, BERTScore), and grounding (RAGAS) metrics. Results showed a consistent trade-off: personalization reliably improved reasoning quality and grounding, yet introduced a significant negative interaction on semantic similarity, driven not by poorer answers but by the limits of current metrics, which penalize meaningful personalized deviations from generic reference texts. This reveals a structural flaw in prevailing LLM evaluation methods, which are ill-suited for assessing user-specific responses. The fully integrated personalized configuration produced the highest overall gains, suggesting that personalization can enhance system effectiveness when evaluated with appropriate multidimensional metrics. Overall, the study demonstrates that personalization produces metric-dependent shifts rather than uniform improvements and provides a methodological foundation for more transparent and robust personalization in agentic AI.