"Many Are My Names": The Anatomy of the Assistant and Its Personas via Sparse Autoencoders
How a language model internally represents who is speaking, the Assistant, an assigned roleplay persona, or a narrated story character, remains underexplored. We study speaker representations using a dataset of user-expressed emotional text and corresponding model responses. We decompose three generation settings (Assistant, Roleplay, and Story) into sparse autoencoder features extracted at turn-boundary and pronoun-token positions and selected through a filtering pipeline for different depths. We characterize each surviving feature through its steering effects and activation distribution. Our main finding is that the Assistant and roleplay personas are not independent alternatives: perso...
| Authors | Adelaide Danilov, Aria Nourbakhsh, Oleksandr Marchenko Breneur et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 8 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.