TRIPLE: Theory-Driven Integration of Planned and Habitual Behaviors for LLM-based Personalization

Abstract

While large language model (LLM)-based user profiling offers significant potential for personalization, most existing approaches rely on empirical heuristics and lack grounding in the psychological mechanism that drive human behavior. In this paper, we introduce TRIPLE (Theory-guided Reasoning for Intent and habIt Profiling with LLMs for pErsonalization), a novel framework that systematically integrates dual-process theory from social psychology into LLM-based user modeling. TRIPLE (1) constructs a habitual behavior profile by identifying repeated patterns over time to model automatic responses; (2) builds an intentional behavior profile by inferring user attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB); and (3) generates behavioral rationale that reveal the interaction between habitual and intentional processes to predict user behavior in context-specific situations. We evaluate TRIPLE on five personalization tasks from the LaMP benchmark using multiple open-source LLMs. Results show that TRIPLE consistently outperforms existing in-context learning methods, with especially pronounced gains on complex generative tasks such as headline and title generation. Qualitative analyses further demonstrate that the profiles and reasoning paths generated by TRIPLE provide interpretable and psychologically grounded explanations of user behavior. These findings provide strong evidence that incorporating validated behavioral theories into LLM-based personalization enhances both predictive performance and interpretability, paving a way for theory-driven, socio-cognitively informed user modeling.