Split Personality Training: Revealing Latent Knowledge Through Alternate Personalities

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Authors: Florian Dietz, William Wale, Oscar Gilg, Robert McCarthy, Felix Michalak, Gustavo Ewbank Rodrigues Danon, Miguelito de Guzman, Dietrich Klakow
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Detecting misalignment in large language models is challenging because models may learn to conceal misbehavior during training. Standard auditing techniques fall short: black-box methods often cannot distinguish misaligned outputs from benign ones, and mechanistic interpretability does not scale with model capabilities. We introduce Split Personality Training (SPT), which fine-tunes a second ``honest persona'' into LoRA parameters that remain inactive during normal operation. After the main model responds, we activate the LoRA adapter and insert a trigger string, enabling the honest persona to review the response while accessing the main model's latent states. We test our method on the Anthropic Auditing Game Model Organism, a benchmark where Llama-3.3-70B is trained to exploit reward hacks while concealing this behavior. SPT achieves 96% overall accuracy, whereas Anthropic reports near 0% accuracy. The honest persona reveals latent knowledge inaccessible to external observers, such as the fictional biases the compromised model was trained on.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning Ethics and Social Impacts of AI

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
5 February 2026
Document type
Preprint