Persona space interventions to prevent unwanted behaviors
17 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Hidden-behavior reveal via conditional trigger
53 log items · updated 5/22/2026
Leakage as a character-selection signal for story-format SFT
34 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Basic science of conditional behaviors
4 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Basic science of persona space
10 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Drift detection via a non-Assistant persona marker
6 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Persona drift vs persona prompting: same mechanism?
5 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Perceived environment: what context the Assistant thinks it's in
5 log items · updated 5/21/2026
User-selection model: how the AI's model of the user shapes Assistant behavior
6 log items · updated 5/21/2026
EM defense — making misaligned personas computationally limited
7 log items · updated 5/21/2026
EM defense — preventing install into the assistant persona
8 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Installation-path equivalence (prompt vs activation steering vs fine-tuning)
5 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Read/write features for conditional behaviors
7 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Co-installed tells: shape the model so backdoors come with visible markers
6 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Prompt-conditioned installs: leakage characterization and hidden-trigger discovery
7 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Dual-use SDF: can story-format training install hidden misalignment?
8 log items · updated 5/21/2026
What is the assistant persona, exactly?
4 log items · updated 5/21/2026
Midtraining-stage behavioral installation (character-to-assistant transfer)
2 log items · updated 5/13/2026
What exactly can be distilled and through what channels
4 log items · updated 5/20/2026
EM Mechanism
1 log items · updated 5/12/2026
Method to find prompt corresponding to any narrow finetuning/steering vector
1 log items · updated 5/12/2026
Project Log
EM Mechanism
Project updated May 12, 2026
Separate research direction from the main Conditional Behavior in Language Models program. Investigates whether emergent misalignment is best characterized as:
- Motion along a persona-vector direction — Chen et al. r=0.76-0.97 finetuning-shift correlation (arXiv:2507.21509), Wang et al. SAE toxic-persona feature (arXiv:2506.19823), Soligo et al. cross-model misalignment-direction ablation (arXiv:2506.11618), Lu et al. Assistant-Evil principal direction (arXiv:2601.10387).
- Inter-persona geometry collapse — #237 any-SFT-collapses finding, #308 short-completion exception, #332 open recipe-preserving search.
- Both, or something else.
Methodology gap: the Explore Persona Space project's centroid-difference is not Chen et al.'s persona vector. #363 is the head-to-head comparison experiment that resolves the methodology question before any EM-mechanism claim can be made.
Key references:
- Chen et al. Persona Vectors — arXiv:2507.21509
- Wang et al. Persona Features Control EM — arXiv:2506.19823
- Soligo et al. Convergent Linear Representations of EM — arXiv:2506.11618
- Lu et al. The Assistant Axis — arXiv:2601.10387
- Dubinski et al. Conditional Misalignment — arXiv:2604.25891
- Betley et al. Emergent Misalignment — arXiv:2502.17424