Roland Aydin
Roland Aydin — researcher or builder tracked in the Angestrom contributor network.
Papers · 2
AnchorBench: A Multi-Pathway Benchmark for the Anchoring Effect in LLMs
The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias in which an initial reference value shifts a later judgment toward itself. This effect is well established in human judgment and decision-making, and recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) exhibit similar behavior. However, existing work on anchoring in LLMs typically evaluates only a narrow set of anchor pathways and rarely distinguishes irrelevant from plausible anchors. We introduce AnchorBench, a benchmark for the anchoring effect in LLMs that evaluates multiple anchor pathways under an explicit anchor relevance axis. Across fourteen
Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero
As language-model-based AI is increasingly deployed in autonomous settings, aligning its goals and values with those of humans becomes critical. Today, alignment, and the assistant identity itself, are typically introduced only after pretraining, once behavioral priors are already established. This can make values a thin overlay, rather than deeply rooted, and facilitate subsequent misalignment. Pursuing a different paradigm, we introduce Synthetic Persona Pretraining (SPP), which installs the desired assistant persona from token zero in pretraining. First, we annotate pretraining documents wi