Large-scale analysis of wild LLM chat logs finds that user interaction patterns stabilize quickly after initial use and correlate with long-term outcomes like retention, creating an agency paradox of limited exploration in unconstrained systems.
From Words to Widgets for Controllable LLM Generation
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abstract
Natural language remains the predominant way people interact with large language models (LLMs). However, users often struggle to precisely express and control subjective preferences (e.g., tone, style, and emphasis) through prompting. We propose Malleable Prompting, a new interactive prompting technique for controllable LLM generation. It reifies preference expressions in natural language prompts into GUI widgets (e.g., sliders, dropdowns, and toggles) that users can directly configure to steer generation, while visualizing each control's influence on the output to support attribution and comparison across iterations. To enable this interaction, we introduce an LLM decoding algorithm that modulates the token probability distribution during generation based on preference expressions and their widget values. Through a user study, we show that Malleable Prompting helps participants achieve target preferences more precisely and is perceived as more controllable and transparent than natural language prompting alone.
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cs.HC 1years
2026 1verdicts
UNVERDICTED 1representative citing papers
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Priming, Path-dependence, and Plasticity: Understanding the molding of user-LLM interaction and its implications from (many) chat logs in the wild
Large-scale analysis of wild LLM chat logs finds that user interaction patterns stabilize quickly after initial use and correlate with long-term outcomes like retention, creating an agency paradox of limited exploration in unconstrained systems.