Pretraining is the natural leverage point for persona-relevant safety interventions, especially in earliest stages

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• Can pretraining-stage interventions through data filtering, gradient-based methods, or architectural modifications target persona directions as they form?question0.812
  Practical safety question about intervening on persona representations during pretraining
• Post-training elicits rather than installs personas; the persona direction is already laid down in pretrainingclaim0.796
  Authors' interpretive endorsement of PSM view, backed by transfer experiments
• Pretraining plays a role analogous to unlabeled experience in humans — building P_prior before semantic binding — explaining why few labeled examples sufficeclaim0.793
  Developmental analogy used to explain sample efficiency under high ρd conditions
• Pretraining stores latent patterns that coherent anchors can bind (or misbind) to targets.quote0.791
  Load-bearing quote capturing the core metaphor
• Persona directions progressively refine during pretraining with most refinement happening early, stabilizing at later checkpointsfinding0.790
  Answers RQ2 geometrically: adjacent-checkpoint cosine similarity stays high but step-to-step movement is largest early
• Persona representations originate in pretraining, not alignment; they form without explicit supervision as useful features for next-token predictionclaim0.785
  Core interpretive claim providing mechanistic explanation for early persona formation
• Post-training steers models toward a particular region of persona space but only loosely tethers them to it, motivating work on training and steering strategies that more deeply anchor models to a coherent personaclaim0.771
  Central interpretive claim and motivation for future work
• Pretrainingconcept0.769
  Initial large-scale training phase whose early stages are shown to form persona representations