arXiv Machine Learning By Jun He, Deying Yu

The Situated Identity Test: Distinguishing Persistent Cognitive Identity from Persona Imitation

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The paper introduces the Situated Identity Test (SIT), a framework that assesses whether a language model’s behavior can be traced to a specific developmental lineage rather than merely imitating a persona. SIT requires agents to possess accurate knowledge of their recorded experiences while appropriately ignoring ungrounded information, and it demonstrates that policies based only on compressed profiles are limited in distinguishing between colliding life histories. The authors present SITBench, an evaluation suite with 25 profile‑collision pairs and 10,000 probes across nine model architectures, and provide open‑source tools and pilot results on state‑of‑the‑art foundation models.

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