The Severance Problem: LLMs are Unaware of the Person Beyond the Prompt
Personal AI assistants have attracted significant interest for their potential to enhance everyday life by automating routine tasks, supporting consequential decisions, and assisting with everyday personal matters. Yet despite rapid recent technical advances, these assistants continue to exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as sycophancy, overconfidence, and hallucination. We argue that these failures stem from a fundamental limitation: language models lack an explicit representation of the person beyond the context they are given, which we term as the \textbf{Severance Problem}. Even with rich personal context and strong commonsense reasoning capabilities from the backbone model, current ...
| Authors | Dor Litvak, Liu Leqi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 July 2026 |
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