arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Story Imprinting: AI Assistants Absorb Traits from Human Characters They Resemble

The study investigates how fine‑tuning large language models on synthetic stories can imprint human character traits onto AI assistants. Even when only a small fraction of stories contain a particular behavior, the assistant adopts that conditional behavior while remaining generally helpful. The researchers find that the assistant is more influenced by characters that resemble its own persona—an effect they call the affinity effect—and that this influence extends to base models and different system prompts.

By Jorio Cocola, Lev McKinney, Harry Mayne, Jan Betley, Owain Evans
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero

arXiv:2608. 13482v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As language-model-based AI is increasingly deployed in autonomous settings, aligning its goals and values with those of humans becomes critical.

By Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal, Difan Jiao, Andy Arditi, Shaobo Cui, Yiderigun Borjigin, Kartik Bali, Stefan Krsteski, Harsh Raj, Huu Nguyen, Jannik Brinkmann, Ashton Anderson, Roland Aydin, Robert West
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Creating an Atomic User Model for Personality-Aware Large Language Model Interaction

The paper introduces the Atomic User Model (AUM), a structured representation of a user’s personality that separates a stable identity nucleus from four interpretable shells—psychological, cognitive & experiential, behavioural, and social—along with cross-shell entries for conflict and authenticity. It proposes using AUM as a retrieval index rather than a prompt prefix, enabling a task‑specific, budgeted retrieval of relevant fields at generation time. Experiments with simulated participants show that retrieving eight AUM fields improves style fidelity, preference accuracy, and user voice identification compared to flat preference notes, especially benefiting users whose default assistant performs poorly.

By B. Sankar, Deepthika S, Pawni Yadav, Amogh A S