Ego: Embedding-Guided Personalization of Vision-Language Models

Abstract: AI assistants that support humans in daily life are becoming increasingly feasible, driven by the rapid advancements in multimodal LLMs. A key challenge lies in overcoming the generic nature of these models to deliver personalized experiences. Existing approaches to personalizing large vision LLMs often rely on additional training stages, which limit generality and scalability, or on engineered pipelines with external pre-trained modules, which hinder deployment efficiency. In this work, we propose an efficient personalization method that leverages the model's inherent ability to capture personalized concepts. Specifically, we extract visual tokens that predominantly represent the target concept by utilizing the model's internal attention mechanisms. These tokens serve as a memory of that specific concept, enabling the model to recall and describe it when it appears in test images. We conduct a comprehensive and unified evaluation of our approach and SOTA methods across various personalization settings including single-concept, multi-concept, and video personalization, demonstrating strong performance gains with minimal personalization overhead.