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Sprint projectAug 17, 2026Saarbrücken

Who am I? - Understanding Persona Preferences with LLMs

Agnes Ahalya Arogyaraj, Raveena Ramamurthy · Team A2R2

Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Who am I? - Understanding Persona Preferences with LLMs

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This project aims to understand persona preferences and decision-making behavior in LLMs by examining how different models respond when given the same persona instructions. We study whether these persona-conditioned preferences produce consistent behavioral patterns across models, and whether those patterns can be recognized through behavioral fingerprinting. As an initial step, we test whether a hidden persona can be identified from repeated choices and explanations, while exploring the broader possibility of using behavioral patterns to characterize or distinguish the underlying model.

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How much would this matter for the field if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. The report was clear and the methodology well presented and easy to follow. The idea to also rely on explanation, instead of just apparent choices, to infer the latent persona was a good one; future work could further investigate these explanations, for example to try and establish if they are with the consistent with the hypothesis of the assistant simulating different personas while retaining "control" of the model and its core identity.

    One potential issue lies with the core hypothesis in the introduction: ''If the same persona produces substantially different behavior across models, the notion of a stable prompted identity becomes difficult to interpret". This is a rather broad hypothesis, which contains some under-specified or undefined concepts (e.g. the notion of a "stable prompted identity"). While the authors are testing if A is true, it's not clear why B would follow A.

    The report could become more focused if the authors spent some time on a more narrow hypothesis that can be proved right or wrong through their current experiments and thinking through the potential implications.

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Cite this project

@misc{arogyaraj2026who,
  title = {{Who am I? - Understanding Persona Preferences with LLMs}},
  author = {Agnes Ahalya Arogyaraj and Raveena Ramamurthy},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  note = {Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/who-am-i-understanding-persona-preferences-with-llms-0g4h}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/who-am-i-understanding-persona-preferences-with-llms-0g4h}
}

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