Is the Assistant Axis formed during post-training or inherited from representations learned during pre-training?

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

• The Assistant Axis is also present in pre-trained base models, where it primarily promotes helpful human archetypes (consultants, coaches) and inhibits spiritual onesclaim0.828
  Extends the Assistant Axis finding to pre-training, suggesting pre-training rather than post-training creates the axis
• Assistant Axisframework0.762
  Contrast vector between mean default Assistant activation and mean of all fully role-playing role vectors; main contribution of the paper
• 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 personaclaim0.758
  Central interpretive claim and motivation for future work
• The model's position along the Assistant Axis depends most strongly on the most recent user message rather than where it was previously in the conversationclaim0.757
  Key mechanistic claim about persona dynamics
• We hypothesize that axes of persona differentiation within LLMs are likely already present in base models and inherited from the pre-training corpushypothesis0.755
  Motivated by near-identical PCs for base and instruct Gemma
• Projections onto the Assistant Axis could serve as a real-time measure of model coherence in deployment—a quantitative signal for when models are drifting from their intended identityclaim0.755
  Proposed future application of the Assistant Axis
• Post-training alignmentconcept0.751
  Broader research area: methods to align model behavior after initial training, where undesired behaviors can emerge.
• Post-training is key to eliciting introspective awarenessfinding0.745
  Base pretrained models show high false positive rates and achieve no net task performance on concept injection detection; post-training essential for introspection.