Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero
Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-15 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML. Authors: Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal (equal contribution), Difan Jiao, Andy Arditi, Shaobo Cui, Jannik Brinkmann, Ashton Anderson, Roland Aydin, Robert West, and others — EPFL, MATS, University of Toronto, Saarland University, Northeastern, SJTU, DFKI, Ontocord AI, Hereon/TUHH arXiv: 2608.13482 · PDF · Models & data TL;DR Every production language model today learns what the world is like during pretraining and only learns who it is supposed to be afterwards, during post-training....