BILLY: Steering Large Language Models via Merging Persona Vectors for Creative Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pai, Tsung-Min, Wang, Jui-I, Lu, Li-Chun, Sun, Shao-Hua, Lee, Hung-Yi, Chang, Kai-Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pai, Tsung-Min
Wang, Jui-I
Lu, Li-Chun
Sun, Shao-Hua
Lee, Hung-Yi
Chang, Kai-Wei
author_facet Pai, Tsung-Min
Wang, Jui-I
Lu, Li-Chun
Sun, Shao-Hua
Lee, Hung-Yi
Chang, Kai-Wei
contents Multi-LLM systems enhance the creativity of large language models by simulating human collective intelligence but suffer from significant drawbacks, such as high computational costs and inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose BILLY (BlendIng persona vectors for Large Language model creativitY), a training-free framework that captures the benefits of multi-LLM collaboration, i.e. inducing diverse perspectives and specialized expertise, within a single model. BILLY operates by extracting and blending multiple distinct persona vectors directly in the model's activation space. We steer the model's generation process with this merged vector while inference, enabling multi-perspective output without explicit multi-LLM communication. Our experiments across creativity-oriented benchmarks demonstrate that BILLY surpasses single model prompting and traditional multi-LLM approaches, while substantially reducing inference time and computational costs. Our analyses further reveal that distinct persona vectors can be blended to achieve both effective control over complementary aspects of generation and greater interpretability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_10157
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BILLY: Steering Large Language Models via Merging Persona Vectors for Creative Generation
Pai, Tsung-Min
Wang, Jui-I
Lu, Li-Chun
Sun, Shao-Hua
Lee, Hung-Yi
Chang, Kai-Wei
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Multi-LLM systems enhance the creativity of large language models by simulating human collective intelligence but suffer from significant drawbacks, such as high computational costs and inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose BILLY (BlendIng persona vectors for Large Language model creativitY), a training-free framework that captures the benefits of multi-LLM collaboration, i.e. inducing diverse perspectives and specialized expertise, within a single model. BILLY operates by extracting and blending multiple distinct persona vectors directly in the model's activation space. We steer the model's generation process with this merged vector while inference, enabling multi-perspective output without explicit multi-LLM communication. Our experiments across creativity-oriented benchmarks demonstrate that BILLY surpasses single model prompting and traditional multi-LLM approaches, while substantially reducing inference time and computational costs. Our analyses further reveal that distinct persona vectors can be blended to achieve both effective control over complementary aspects of generation and greater interpretability.
title BILLY: Steering Large Language Models via Merging Persona Vectors for Creative Generation
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10157