"Many Are My Names": The Anatomy of the Assistant and Its Personas via Sparse Autoencoders
Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:"Many Are My Names": The Anatomy of the Assistant and Its Personas via Sparse Autoencoders
Abstract:How a language model internally represents who is speaking, the Assistant, an assigned roleplay persona, or a narrated story character, remains underexplored. We study speaker representations using a dataset of user-expressed emotional text and corresponding model responses. We decompose three generation settings (Assistant, Roleplay, and Story) into sparse autoencoder features extracted at turn-boundary and pronoun-token positions and selected through a filtering pipeline for different depths. We characterize each surviving feature through its steering effects and activation distribution. Our main finding is that the Assistant and roleplay personas are not independent alternatives: personas retain the Assistant-associated feature core while progressively differentiating from it across layers, starting from operational machinery towards behavioral and stylistic features. Meanwhile, generated story characters lack the Assistant-associated core. Both Story and Roleplay can be distinguished from the Assistant with Immersive Simulation Mode. However, the Assistant can sometimes enter or slowly drift into it even in the default setting.
| Comments: | 38 pages, 9 tables, 4 figures, 2 listings |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.07852 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.07852v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.07852
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language
-
Geometric and Behavioral Stratification in Transformer Residual Streams
Aug 14
-
Perturbation-based Regional Interpretability through Subtraction Mapping (PRISM): naming-error dissociations in language models and post-stroke aphasia
Aug 14
-
I-SDPO: Instance-Level Adaptive Self-Distillation Policy Optimization
Aug 14
-
Comment on "Modeling rapid language learning by distilling Bayesian priors into artificial neural networks"
Aug 14
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.