Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves average-case reasoning, but a non-trivial fraction of CoT traces contain internal contradictions that the model nevertheless ignores when producing its final answer. We propose SV-CoT, a self-verifying variant in which the model is asked, between reasoning and answer, to enumerate a small number of consistency claims and check them against the trace.
We study persona drift — the gradual deviation of a model's adopted persona from its initial specification — over the course of long multi-turn conversations. Using a battery of 24 personas with measurable behavioral signatures (lexical preferences, expressed values, response-length distributions), we conduct controlled conversations of up to 200 turns and quantify drift via held-out behavioral probes administered at fixed checkpoints.
Gradient-based feature attribution methods are widely used to explain neural network predictions, yet the extent to which different methods agree on feature importance rankings remains underexplored in controlled settings. We train multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) of varying depth (1, 2, and 4 hidden layers) on synthetic Gaussian cluster data and compute three attribution methods—vanilla gradient, gradient\timesinput, and integrated gradients—for 100 test samples across 3 random seeds.