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Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero

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TL;DR - Synthetic Persona Pretraining embeds a constitution-aligned assistant persona from the start of language-model pretraining rather than adding alignment only afterward. Experiments suggest this early intervention improves value adherence and jailbreak robustness without sacrificing capabilities.

  • Adds aligned first-person reflections, generated from a normative constitution, to standard pretraining documents.
  • Uses ordinary cross-entropy pretraining, followed by “persona binding” on user-assistant dialogues.
  • Models up to 3B parameters trained on 500B tokens showed fewer misaligned responses in out-of-distribution moral dilemmas.
  • Introducing the method only near the end of pretraining was less effective, while its advantage increased with pretraining budget.

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Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero

arXiv cs.LG Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal, Difan Jiao, Andy Arditi, Shaobo Cui, Yiderigun Borjigin, Kartik Bali, Stefan Krsteski, Harsh Raj, Huu Nguyen, Jannik Brinkmann, Ashton Anderson, Roland Aydin, Robert West 2026-08-13 arXiv:2608.13482
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 1
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 1 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-14 14:23:33.346595 UTC

TL;DR - Synthetic Persona Pretraining embeds a constitution-aligned assistant persona from the start of language-model pretraining rather than adding alignment only afterward. Experiments suggest this early intervention improves value adherence and jailbreak robustness without sacrificing capabilities.

  • Adds aligned first-person reflections, generated from a normative constitution, to standard pretraining documents.
  • Uses ordinary cross-entropy pretraining, followed by “persona binding” on user-assistant dialogues.
  • Models up to 3B parameters trained on 500B tokens showed fewer misaligned responses in out-of-distribution moral dilemmas.
  • Introducing the method only near the end of pretraining was less effective, while its advantage increased with pretraining budget.
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