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Related papers: Tracing Persona Vectors Through LLM Pretraining

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The False Belief Test (FBT) has been the main method for assessing Theory of Mind (ToM) and related socio-cognitive competencies. For Large Language Models (LLMs), the reliability and explanatory potential of this test have remained limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tom Kouwenhoven , Michiel van der Meer , Max van Duijn

A long-standing challenge in developing accurate recommendation models is simulating user behavior, mainly due to the complex and stochastic nature of user interactions. Towards this, one promising line of work has been the use of Large…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Himanshu Thakur , Eshani Agrawal , Smruthi Mukund

Recent work exploring the capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to act as general pattern machines by completing complex token sequences representing a wide array of tasks, including…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Seyed Parsa Neshaei , Richard Lee Davis , Adam Hazimeh , Bojan Lazarevski , Pierre Dillenbourg , Tanja Käser

The use of large language models (LLMs) to simulate human behavior has gained significant attention, particularly through personas that approximate individual characteristics. Persona-based simulations hold promise for transforming…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Ang Li , Haozhe Chen , Hongseok Namkoong , Tianyi Peng

The humanlike responses of large language models (LLMs) have prompted social scientists to investigate whether LLMs can be used to simulate human participants in experiments, opinion polls and surveys. Of central interest in this line of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Nikolay B Petrov , Gregory Serapio-García , Jason Rentfrow

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on benign narrow data can sometimes induce broad harmful behaviors, a vulnerability termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work links these failures to specific directions in the activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Krishak Aneja , Manas Mittal , Anmol Goel , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru , Vamshi Krishna Bonagiri

People acquire concepts through rich physical and social experiences and use them to understand and navigate the world. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), trained solely through next-token prediction on text, exhibit strikingly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Ningyu Xu , Qi Zhang , Chao Du , Qiang Luo , Xipeng Qiu , Xuanjing Huang , Menghan Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit highly agreeable and reinforcing conversational styles, also known as AI-sycophancy. Although this pattern arises from training objectives that reward user satisfaction over accuracy, it may become…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Zeyi Lu , Angelica Henestrosa , Pavel Chizhov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as autonomous agents in strategic and social interactions. Although recent studies suggest that assigning personality traits to LLMs can influence their behavior, how personality steering…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Mizuki Sakai , Mizuki Yokoyama , Wakaba Tateishi , Genki Ichinose

Student simulation with Large language models (LLMs) offers a scalable alternative for educational research and teacher training. Yet, its validity depends on whether models maintain stable personas across extended interactions. We test…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jana Gonnermann-Müller , Jennifer Haase , Nicolas Leins , Thomas Kosch , Sebastian Pokutta

Personality imbuing customizes LLM behavior, but safety evaluations almost always study prompt-based personas alone. We show this is incomplete: prompting and activation steering expose *different*, architecture-dependent vulnerability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Wenkai Li , Fan Yang , Shaunak A. Mehta , Koichi Onoue

Questionnaires are a common method for detecting the personality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their reliability is often compromised by two main issues: hallucinations (where LLMs produce inaccurate or irrelevant responses) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Baohua Zhan , Yongyi Huang , Wenyao Cui , Huaping Zhang , Jianyun Shang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved personalized conversational capabilities. However, existing datasets like Persona Chat, Synthetic Persona Chat, and Blended Skill Talk rely on static, predefined personas. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Sayantan Pal , Souvik Das , Rohini K. Srihari

This research explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to utilize psychometric values, specifically personality information, within the context of video game character development. Affective Computing (AC) systems quantify a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Lawrence J. Klinkert , Stephanie Buongiorno , Corey Clark

Prior work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can predict human attitudes based on other attitudes, but this work has largely focused on predictions from highly similar and interrelated attitudes. In contrast, human attitudes are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Ana Ma , Derek Powell

Large language models (LLMs) have become proficient at sophisticated code-generation tasks, yet remain ineffective at reliably detecting or avoiding code vulnerabilities. Does this deficiency stem from insufficient learning about code…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Weichen Yu , Ravi Mangal , Terry Zhuo , Matt Fredrikson , Corina S. Pasareanu

In large language model (LLM) pretraining, data quality is believed to determine model quality. In this paper, we re-examine the notion of "quality" from the perspective of pre- and post-training co-design. Specifically, we explore the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Kenneth Li , Yida Chen , Fernanda Viégas , Martin Wattenberg

Large language models are classically trained in stages: pretraining on raw text followed by post-training for instruction following and reasoning. However, this separation creates a fundamental limitation: many desirable behaviors such as…

Value trade-offs are an integral part of human decision-making and language use, however, current tools for interpreting such dynamic and multi-faceted notions of values in language models are limited. In cognitive science, so-called…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sonia K. Murthy , Rosie Zhao , Jennifer Hu , Sham Kakade , Markus Wulfmeier , Peng Qian , Tomer Ullman

Recent works have showcased the ability of LLMs to embody diverse personas in their responses, exemplified by prompts like 'You are Yoda. Explain the Theory of Relativity.' While this ability allows personalization of LLMs and enables human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Shashank Gupta , Vaishnavi Shrivastava , Ameet Deshpande , Ashwin Kalyan , Peter Clark , Ashish Sabharwal , Tushar Khot