persona-vectors 0.3.0

Library for extracting and analyzing persona vectors

Persona Vectors

Extract persona-aligned activation vectors from language models and experiment with activation steering.

[!WARNING] This is very experimental currently 🚨

Overview

Given a set of personas and evaluation questions, this project:

1. Formats each persona as a system prompt (short templated or long biography)
2. Extracts hidden states at each layer (with support to then mask some specific tokens)
3. Averages those hidden states across questions to produce a persona vector per layer

The resulting vectors can be compared across layers (cosine similarity) and eventually used for steering experiments.

Repository Layout

persona-vectors/
├── notebooks/
│   ├── notebook_extract.py      # Extraction pipeline (primary working script)
│   ├── notebook_compare.py      # Load saved activations and compare variants
│   └── notebook_steer.py        # Steering experiments
├── src/persona_vectors/
│   ├── activations.py           # Core extraction helpers
│   ├── analysis.py              # PCA / UMAP projections and scatter plots
│   ├── artifacts.py             # Save/load/query activation artifact helpers
│   ├── plots.py                 # Layer-wise cosine similarity plots
│   ├── steering.py              # Steering vector computation and application
│   └── parser.py                # CLI argument parsing
├── artifacts/                   # Saved activations (gitignored)
├── docs/                        # Reference documentation
└── main.py                      # CLI entry point

Dataset loading (SynthPersonaDataset, PersonaGuessDataset) and environment helpers come from the sibling persona-data package.

For local development, uncomment the path source in pyproject.toml and keep persona-data checked out next to this repo.

Installation

uv sync
cp .env.example .env

Python >=3.12 is required.

Quickstart

# Extract activations (run this first)
uv run python -m notebooks.notebook_extract

# Load saved activations / compare variants
uv run python -m notebooks.notebook_compare

# Analyze saved activations (parsed, not implemented yet)
uv run python main.py analyze --out ./plots --similarity cosine

# Compute a steering vector from saved activations
uv run python main.py steer --persona-id <UUID> --model google/gemma-2-9b-it --layer 20

Streamlit App

The Streamlit UI lives in the sibling persona-ui repo.

How It Works

Two Notebooks

notebook_extract.py runs the full flow end to end:

1. Load dataset questions and answers
2. Extract per-question activations
3. Save them to disk
4. Mask and average the selected token spans

notebook_compare.py loads saved activations via ActivationStore and compares variants.

notebook_steer.py loads saved activations and computes a steering vector for a selected persona.

Saved Format

Each extraction produces:

artifacts/activations/<model_dir>/<prompt_variant>/<persona_id>/
├── activations.safetensors   # Per-question hidden states
└── metadata.json            # persona_id, persona_name, questions, n_questions, num_layers, hidden_size

<model_dir> is the model name with / replaced by __.

The metadata stores the question text directly, so load-time analysis no longer needs to re-resolve qids from the dataset. It also stores tensor shape fields for validation at load time.

CLI

extract and steer are implemented. analyze is parsed but still raises NotImplementedError.

# Extract activations
python main.py extract --model google/gemma-2-2b-it

# Analyze saved activations (not implemented yet)
python main.py analyze --out ./plots --similarity cosine

# Run steering (example)
python main.py steer --layer 10 --model "google/gemma-2-9b-it" --persona-id 005e1868-4e17-47e3-94fa-0d20e8d93662