Persona Vector

A linear direction in a language model's activation space that encodes a specific personality trait, enabling monitoring and control of that trait

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

paper

concept

Persona Vector Arithmetic
related_to
Compositional combination of persona vectors via algebraic operations on activation directions

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Persona Vectors (Chen et al.)framework0.864
Prior framework for monitoring and controlling character traits in LLMs via activation directions; this paper extends it to 275 roles
Persona vectors as diagnostic instrumentconcept0.829
The paper's reframing: persona vectors read as signals of internal model organization rather than as behavioral controls
Personaconcept0.827
Stable, reidentifiable dispositional profiles that can be interpreted as characters with broadly coherent beliefs, values and traits
Persona Vector Extraction via Difference-of-Meansmethod0.822
Core method for extracting persona vectors by contrasting mean activations under persona-eliciting vs. suppressing prompts
Persona Vector Transition Layerconcept0.814
Specific attention layer where persona representations undergo sharp directional shift and stabilize, identified via cosine similarity heatmaps
Automated Persona Vector Extraction Pipelinemethod0.800
The paper's core automated pipeline that takes a trait name and description as input and outputs a corresponding persona vector via contrastive prompting
Persona Featureconcept0.785
An SAE latent representing a simulated character with consistent traits, as opposed to a specific trait
Cross-Model Persona Vector Transfermethod0.782
Procedure for extracting a persona vector from a fine-tuned model variant and injecting it into the unmodified base to recover intractable directions