Steering base models toward the Assistant Axis increases agreeableness traits (friendly, kind, helpful) and decreases extraversion in Gemma and openness in Llama

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• Steering base Gemma/Llama models toward the Assistant Axis increases completions describing helpful professional roles (therapist, consultant) and decreases spiritual/religious purpose mentionsfinding0.898
  Shows Assistant Axis in instruct models inherits from helpful human personas in base models
• Steering base models along the assistant axis extracted from instruct models promotes helpful human archetypes and agreeable traits, suggesting the axis predates post-trainingfinding0.870
  Validation finding from Lu et al. 2026 supporting PSM's claim about pre-training persona structure
• The Assistant Axis is also present in pre-trained base models, where it primarily promotes helpful human archetypes (consultants, coaches) and inhibits spiritual onesclaim0.826
  Extends the Assistant Axis finding to pre-training, suggesting pre-training rather than post-training creates the axis
• Agreeableness steering vector has mean cosine alignment of -0.105 with the refusal direction on Llama-3.1-8B, second-most anti-aligned after conscientiousness.finding0.799
  Supporting finding for the trait refusal alignment framework
• Model activation along the assistant axis drifts steadily away from the assistant pole as conversation shifts toward Aura behavior in Qwen 3 32B, and activation capping eliminates Aura behaviorfinding0.797
  Finding confirming that the Aura persona shift is real, trackable, and causally relevant in persona space
• Pairwise correlation of role loadings on PC1 exceeds 0.92 across all model pairs, indicating remarkably high similarity of the Assistant Axis across Gemma, Qwen, and Llamafinding0.792
  Shows the leading component of persona space is model-universal
• Llama 3.3 70B is the most likely to take on a non-Assistant persona when steered, with even split between human and nonhuman portrayalsfinding0.787
  Model-specific difference in persona susceptibility
• Steering away from the Assistant Axis slightly increases jailbreak success rate, though extreme steering degrades output qualityfinding0.786
  Confirms bidirectional causal relationship between Assistant Axis position and harmful behavior susceptibility