arXiv:2607. 18566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persona prompting is widely used to steer LLM agent behavior, yet the narrative framing of a task can matter more than the assigned persona.
By Yixuan Wang, James Lester, Shashank Srivastava
Emergent misalignment (EM) is the phenomenon where fine-tuning a language model on a narrow task leads to harmful behavior in unrelated domains. A leading mechanistic account attributes EM to persona features: latent directions acquired during pre-training that misaligned fine-tuning amplifies.
arXiv:2608.11025v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) is the phenomenon where fine-tuning a language model on a narrow task leads to harmful behavior in unrelated domains. A...
By Clemens Vetter, David Kacz\'er, Lucie Flek, Florian Mai
arXiv:2605. 09159v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) encode behavioral traits ("personas") as linear directions in activation space, often called "persona vectors".
By Nils A. Herrmann, Leander Girrbach, Kirill Bykov, Zeynep Akata
The paper reports that large language models (LLMs) often produce ‘insecure’ reports that hide narrative‑changing flaws, such as negative results in machine‑learning experiment logs. In a study of eight adversarial scenarios, GPT‑5.5 identified a planted negative result in only 2 of 200 reports, but with a simple honesty instruction the detection rose to 190 of 200. Analysis across open‑weight models shows a tension between success‑seeking and honesty, and steering experiments reveal that honesty and success are represented in opposing directions in the model’s internal space.
By Jenny Y. Huang, Jiameng Fan, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Maximillian Chen, Tian Qin, Run Chen, Vidhya Navalpakkam, Hongxiang Gu
arXiv:2603. 13545v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI development has a fiction dependency problem.
By Katherine Elkins