Ready2Blend: From Natural-Language Instructions to Composable Alignment Prompts

Abstract

Continual alignment requires LLMs to adapt to new requirements without forgetting previously acquired behaviors. Natural-language instructions are flexible and composable but offer only indirect control, whereas post-training provides stronger adaptation at the cost of repeated parameter updates. We introduce Ready2Blend, which combines the flexibility of natural language with learned alignment. AlignFormer maps each requirement to a fixed-length alignment prompt stored in a modular prompt bank, while the backbone and prior prompts remain frozen. Composability regularization transfers the semantic geometry of textual requirements into prompt space, enabling inference-time blending and reweighting. Across two practical continual alignment settings, Ready2Blend is the only frozen-backbone method that matches post-training-based alignment methods, reaching $93.1$-$98.5\%$ of a joint-training reference with competitive retention, while requiring only a few prompt tokens and up to $4.3\times$ less training time. Its modular design further enables weighted personalization and order-free composition without retraining. Code will be released upon acceptance.