Persona Matters: Effects of Activation Steering on Short Answer Generation and Scoring
Activation-based steering enables inference-time personalization of large language models, but its effects in educational applications are not well understood. We study activation-based persona vectors representing seven character traits in short-answer generation and automated scoring on the ASAP-SAS benchmark, across three language models spanning dense and mixture-of-experts architectures. Persona steering lowers answer quality overall, with much larger effects on open-ended English Language Arts (ELA) prompts than on factual science prompts. Interpretive and argumentative tasks are particularly sensitive, showing up to 11$\times$ larger degradation. On the scoring side, we observe pre...
| Authors | Yongchao Wu, Aron Henriksson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 July 2026 |
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