arXiv Computation and Language

Persona Perspectives: Adopting Viewpoints Reorganizes Representations in LLMs

arXiv AI
Jul 29

Localizing Persona Representations in LLMs

arXiv:2505. 24539v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a study on how and where personas -- defined by distinct sets of human characteristics, values, and beliefs -- are encoded in the representation space of large language models (LLMs).

By Celia Cintas, Miriam Rateike, Erik Miehling, Elizabeth Daly, Skyler Speakman
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Political Ideology Shifts in Large Language Models

arXiv:2508.16013v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in politically sensitive contexts, raising concerns about their susceptibility to ideologica...

By Pietro Bernardelle, Stefano Civelli, Leon Fr\"ohling, Riccardo Lunardi, Kevin Roitero, Gianluca Demartini
arXiv AI
Jun 30

LLM-Ideoplasticity: Measuring Ideological Plasticity in the Political Behavior of LLMs as a Context-Conditioned Distribution

arXiv:2606. 28335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue, with systematic empirical evidence, that a large language model's political ideology is not a fixed point, but a conditional distribution $\mathbb{P}($position$\mid$context$)$ over a real political space.

By Adib Sakhawat, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Tahsin Islam, Takia Farhin, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

The Neutral Mask: How Alignment Training Provides Shallow Alignment while Leaving Partisan Structure Intact in a Large Language Model

The paper investigates how alignment training, specifically reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), affects the internal partisan structure of a large language model. Using a mechanistic case study on Llama 3.1 8B, the authors find that alignment training does not erase the model’s partisan geometry but compresses its variance, producing consistently balanced, non‑partisan outputs. Sparse autoencoder analysis and feature‑level steering experiments reveal that policy‑encoding features become inactive in the aligned model, indicating a causal disconnect rather than structural removal of partisan knowledge.

By Wendy K. Tam
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Representational alignment yields generalizable safety in language models

The paper argues that aligning large language models (LLMs) at the level of latent representations—specifically by matching their internal categorization of moral concepts to human prototype-based judgments—improves safety. Current alignment methods that focus on observable responses fail to preserve fine-grained moral categorization, leaving models vulnerable to adversarial rephrasings. By optimizing representational similarity, the authors demonstrate that LLMs can maintain more robust moral categorization and exhibit better adversarial robustness across multiple benchmarks and model sizes.

By Lingyu Li, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang, Xia Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Inference-Time Mitigation of Adversarial Political Bias in Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 14629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become the mainstay for information retrieval and summarization tasks, ensuring that they are always non-partisan and invulnerable to political bias is a critical step towards safer and more trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI).

By Tejaswi V. Panchagnula, Bruce Coburn, Bryce J. Dietrich, Robert X. Browning, Edward J. Delp, Fengqing Zhu