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Related papers: Psychological Steering of Large Language Models

200 papers

Personality manipulation in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly applied in customer service and agentic scenarios, yet its mechanisms and trade-offs remain unclear. We present a systematic study of personality control using the Big…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Gunmay Handa , Zekun Wu , Adriano Koshiyama , Philip Treleaven

Steering methods influence Large Language Model behavior by identifying semantic directions in hidden representations, but are typically realized through inference-time activation interventions that apply a fixed, global modification to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Chung-En Sun , Ge Yan , Zimo Wang , Tsui-Wei Weng

We introduce Directional Stimulus Prompting, a novel framework for guiding black-box large language models (LLMs) toward specific desired outputs. Instead of directly adjusting LLMs, our method employs a small tunable policy model (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Zekun Li , Baolin Peng , Pengcheng He , Michel Galley , Jianfeng Gao , Xifeng Yan

The ability to control LLMs' emulated emotional states and personality traits is essential for enabling rich, human-centered interactions in socially interactive settings. We introduce PsySET, a Psychologically-informed benchmark to…

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are being quickly adapted to many domains, including healthcare, their strengths and pitfalls remain under-explored. In our study, we examine the effects of prompt engineering to guide Large Language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Daniil Filienko , Yinzhou Wang , Caroline El Jazmi , Serena Xie , Trevor Cohen , Martine De Cock , Weichao Yuwen

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasing conversational fluency, yet instilling them with nuanced, human-like emotional expression remains a significant challenge. Current alignment techniques often address surface-level output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Niranjan Chebrolu , Gerard Christopher Yeo , Kokil Jaidka

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly enhanced language models' capabilities in complex problem-solving by emulating human-like deliberative thinking. However, these models often exhibit overthinking (i.e.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yang Deng , Xingyu Sui , Yulin Hu , Yanyan Zhao , Wanxiang Che , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

Changing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) can be as straightforward as editing the Transformer's residual streams using appropriately constructed "steering vectors." These modifications to internal neural activations, a form of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Haijiang Yan , Thomas L. Griffiths

Can large language models reliably express a human-like personality, or are they merely mimicking surface cues without a stable underlying profile? To investigate this, we induce personality in LLMs by fine-tuning them on the long-form…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Prateek Rajput , Yewei Song , Iyiola E. Olatunji , Jacques Klein , Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

Aligned representations across languages is a desired property in multilingual large language models (mLLMs), as alignment can improve performance in cross-lingual tasks. Typically alignment requires fine-tuning a model, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Anirudh Sundar , Sinead Williamson , Katherine Metcalf , Barry-John Theobald , Skyler Seto , Masha Fedzechkina

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human users in interactive settings such as therapy, education, and social role-play. While these simulations enable scalable training and evaluation of AI agents, off-the-shelf…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Marwa Abdulhai , Ryan Cheng , Donovan Clay , Tim Althoff , Sergey Levine , Natasha Jaques

Intervention is one of the most representative and widely used methods for understanding the internal representations of large language models (LLMs). However, existing intervention methods are confined to linear interventions grounded in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Sangwoo Kim

Personality traits have long been studied as predictors of human behavior. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest similar patterns may emerge in artificial systems, with advanced LLMs displaying consistent behavioral…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Pengrui Han , Rafal Kocielnik , Peiyang Song , Ramit Debnath , Dean Mobbs , Anima Anandkumar , R. Michael Alvarez

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) incurs considerable training costs, driving the need for data-efficient training with optimised data ordering. Human-inspired strategies offer a solution by organising data based on human learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Yushi Yang , Andrew M. Bean , Robert McCraith , Adam Mahdi

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making contexts. While prior work has shown that LLMs exhibit cognitive biases behaviorally, whether these biases correspond to identifiable internal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Fan Huang , Songheng Zhang , Haewoon Kwak , Jisun An

Large language models (LLMs) offer emerging opportunities for psychological and behavioral research, but methodological guidance is lacking. This article provides a framework for using LLMs as psychological simulators across two primary…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zhicheng Lin

This study validates Large Language Models (LLMs) as a dynamic alternative to questionnaire-based personality assessment. Using a within-subjects experiment (N=33), we compared Big Five personality scores derived from guided LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Andrius Matšenas , Anet Lello , Tõnis Lees , Hans Peep , Kim Lilii Tamm

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Eric Bigelow , Daniel Wurgaft , YingQiao Wang , Noah Goodman , Tomer Ullman , Hidenori Tanaka , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Kartik Sharma , Rakshit S. Trivedi

As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain autonomous capabilities, their coordination in multi-agent settings becomes increasingly important. However, they often struggle with cooperation, leading to suboptimal outcomes. Inspired by Axelrod's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Kenneth J. K. Ong , Lye Jia Jun , Hieu Minh "Jord" Nguyen , Seong Hah Cho , Natalia Pérez-Campanero Antolín