Latent Personality Alignment: Improving Harmlessness Without Mentioning Harms

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Le, Linh, Williams-King, David, Merzouk, Mohamed Amine, Kamanda, Aton, Oberman, Adam
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866914546233376768
author Le, Linh
Williams-King, David
Merzouk, Mohamed Amine
Kamanda, Aton
Oberman, Adam
author_facet Le, Linh
Williams-King, David
Merzouk, Mohamed Amine
Kamanda, Aton
Oberman, Adam
contents Current adversarial robustness methods for large language models require extensive datasets of harmful prompts (thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples), yet remain vulnerable to novel attack vectors and distributional shifts. We propose Latent Personality Alignment (LPA), a sample-efficient defense that achieves robustness by training models on abstract personality traits rather than specific harmful behaviors. Using fewer than 100 trait statements and latent adversarial training, LPA achieves comparable attack success rates to methods trained on 150k+ examples, while maintaining superior utility. Critically, LPA generalizes better to unseen attack distributions, reducing misclassification rates by 2.6x compared to baseline across six harm benchmarks -- without ever seeing harmful examples during training. Our results demonstrate that personality-based alignment offers a principled approach to building robust defenses with minimal cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08496
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Latent Personality Alignment: Improving Harmlessness Without Mentioning Harms
Le, Linh
Williams-King, David
Merzouk, Mohamed Amine
Kamanda, Aton
Oberman, Adam
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
Current adversarial robustness methods for large language models require extensive datasets of harmful prompts (thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples), yet remain vulnerable to novel attack vectors and distributional shifts. We propose Latent Personality Alignment (LPA), a sample-efficient defense that achieves robustness by training models on abstract personality traits rather than specific harmful behaviors. Using fewer than 100 trait statements and latent adversarial training, LPA achieves comparable attack success rates to methods trained on 150k+ examples, while maintaining superior utility. Critically, LPA generalizes better to unseen attack distributions, reducing misclassification rates by 2.6x compared to baseline across six harm benchmarks -- without ever seeing harmful examples during training. Our results demonstrate that personality-based alignment offers a principled approach to building robust defenses with minimal cost.
title Latent Personality Alignment: Improving Harmlessness Without Mentioning Harms
topic Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08496