As X, Do Y: How Persona and Task Combine in Instruction-Tuned LLMs

arXiv:2605.23147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Role prompts of the form As X, do Y admit a clean linear decomposition at one specific site in the residual stream: the prompt-to-answer transition -- the last prompt token together with the first two generated tokens -- in an early/mid layer band. There, persona and task contribute through partially orthogonal additive directions. Forming a pure persona effect $\Delta_X$, a pure task effect $\Delta_Y$, and substituting $h_{BB} + \Delta_X + \Delta_Y$ for the clean residual yields downstream output within a small KL of clean on Gemma-2-2B-IT and

Source: arXiv cs.AI — read the full report at the original publisher.

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