Creating an Atomic User Model for Personality-Aware Large Language Model Interaction

Abstract

Assistants built on large language models are expected to write as their user would, and the dominant approach is single-channel: preferences summarised from conversation history and reinserted into context. This inverts the order of inference. Preferences are the task-dependent surface of a comparatively stable personality structure, so a system storing only preferences relearns the person whenever the task changes. First, we characterise personality seepage, where a prompt's linguistic surface carries a personality fingerprint the assistant mirrors without access to the personality behind it. Second, we propose the Atomic User Model (AUM), a human-readable representation organising a person as a stable identity nucleus with four interpretable shells (psychological, cognitive and experiential, behavioural, and social), plus cross-shell entries recording internal conflict and authenticity. Third, we treat AUM as a retrieval index over a person rather than a prompt prefix, with a pipeline where a task classifier, component-selection function and budgeted retriever return a small payload of fields at generation time. Fourth, we evaluate it with sixteen language-model-simulated participants, six style-sensitive tasks and three seeds, plus a synthetic scaling study of the retriever. Retrieving eight fields matched the style fidelity of the full user model on 23% of the context (211 tokens against 915), improved on flat preference notes by 0.24 points on a five-point scale (p<0.001, dz = 0.50), and raised forced-choice identification of the participant's own voice from 14.9% to 42.7% (25% chance). Four pre-registered controls returned null, locating the effect in the representation rather than the search over it. The benefit is largest for participants the un-personalised assistant reproduces worst (rho = -0.61, p = 0.013): personalisation is worth most to those the default serves least.