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Related papers: Tracing Persona Vectors Through LLM Pretraining

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Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, necessitating a deeper understanding of their decision-making behaviour under risk. This study investigates the relationship between LLMs' personality traits and…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-03-10 John Hartley , Conor Hamill , Devesh Batra , Dale Seddon , Ramin Okhrati , Raad Khraishi

Activation-based steering can personalize large language models at inference time, but its effects in educational settings remain unclear. We study persona vectors for seven character traits in short-answer generation and automated scoring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Yongchao Wu , Aron Henriksson

As large language models (LLMs) become ubiquitous in our daily tasks and digital interactions, associated privacy risks are increasingly in focus. While LLM privacy research has primarily focused on the leakage of model training data, it…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Batuhan Tömekçe , Mark Vero , Robin Staab , Martin Vechev

Persona conditioning can be viewed as a behavioral prior for large language models (LLMs) and is often assumed to confer expertise and improve safety in a monotonic manner. However, its effects on high-stakes clinical decision-making remain…

Despite the recent success of instruction-tuned language models and their ubiquitous usage, very little is known of how models process instructions internally. In this work, we address this gap from a mechanistic point of view by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Irina Bigoulaeva , Jonas Rohweder , Subhabrata Dutta , Iryna Gurevych

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

Large Language Models exhibit implicit personalities in their generation, but reliably controlling or aligning these traits to meet specific needs remains an open challenge. The need for effective mechanisms for behavioural manipulation of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Pranav Bhandari , Nicolas Fay , Sanjeevan Selvaganapathy , Amitava Datta , Usman Naseem , Mehwish Nasim

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as dominant foundational models in modern NLP. However, the understanding of their prediction processes and internal mechanisms, such as feed-forward networks (FFN) and multi-head self-attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Xintong Wang , Xiaoyu Li , Xingshan Li , Chris Biemann

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

Evaluating personality traits in Large Language Models (LLMs) is key to model interpretation, comparison, and responsible deployment. However, existing questionnaire-based evaluation methods exhibit limited stability and offer little…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Xiaoxu Ma , Xiangbo Zhang , Zhenyu Weng

Recent success of pre-trained language models (LMs) has spurred widespread interest in the language capabilities that they possess. However, efforts to understand whether LM representations are useful for symbolic reasoning tasks have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Alon Talmor , Yanai Elazar , Yoav Goldberg , Jonathan Berant

The paradigm of scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) in both parameter size and test time has pushed the boundaries of AI capabilities, but at the cost of making the traditional generative evaluation paradigm prohibitively expensive,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Zhichen Liu , Tianle Lun , Zhibin Wen , Hao An , Yulin Ou , Jianhui Xu , Hao Zhang , Wenyi Fang , Yang Zheng , Yang Xu

Have Large Language Models (LLMs) developed a personality? The short answer is a resounding "We Don't Know!". In this paper, we show that we do not yet have the right tools to measure personality in language models. Personality is an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Xiaoyang Song , Akshat Gupta , Kiyan Mohebbizadeh , Shujie Hu , Anant Singh

Large Language Models (LLMs) behave non-deterministically, and prompting has become a common method for steering their outputs. A popular strategy is to assign a persona to the model to produce more varied, context-sensitive responses,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Bruce W. Lee , Yeongheon Lee , Hyunsoo Cho

Persona-driven large language models (LLMs) require consistent behavioral tendencies across interactions to simulate human-like personality traits, such as persistence or reliability. However, current LLMs often lack stable internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Yifan Luo , Kangping Xu , Yanzhen Lu , Yang Yuan , Andrew Chi-Chih Yao

The task of persona-steered text generation requires large language models (LLMs) to generate text that reflects the distribution of views that an individual fitting a persona could have. People have multifaceted personas, but prior work on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Andy Liu , Mona Diab , Daniel Fried

The text produced by language models (LMs) can exhibit specific `behaviors,' such as a failure to follow alignment training, that we hope to detect and react to during deployment. Identifying these behaviors can often only be done post…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Dhananjay Ashok , Jonathan May

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as surrogates for human participants, but it remains unclear which models best capture human behavior and why. To address this, we introduce Psych-201, a novel dataset that enables us to…

Personality, a fundamental aspect of human cognition, contains a range of traits that influence behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. This paper explores the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in reconstructing these complex…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yongyi Ji , Zhisheng Tang , Mayank Kejriwal