The Situated Identity Test: Distinguishing Persistent Cognitive Identity from Persona Imitation

Abstract:Large language models can convincingly adopt personas, recall past dialogues, and weave rich autobiographies. Yet this conversational eloquence conceals a fundamental attribution problem: looking the part does not mean having lived the life. Two individuals can share identical public profiles--the same age, hometown, occupation, and personality traits--while possessing entirely distinct private histories, relationships, and acquired skills. When conditioned solely on that shared profile, an agent lacks the information required to determine which lineage is correct. We introduce the Situated Identity Test (SIT), an architecture-independent framework that evaluates whether an agent's behavior is functionally attributable to a specific developmental lineage. Grounded identity requires both appropriate knowledge of recorded experiences and appropriate ignorance of ungrounded ones, bounded by what the identity has actually acquired rather than what its underlying foundation model knows. We prove that any policy conditioned solely on a compressed profile is bounded by an average situated validity of at most 1/m across m colliding life histories on lineage-discriminative queries (at most 50% for paired lineages). We instantiate this framework in SITBench, an evaluation suite designed for 25 profile-collision pairs (50 distinct lineages) across 10,000 planned probes and nine architectural configurations. Supported by an open-source reference implementation, deterministic test fixtures, and empirical pilot evaluations on frontier foundation models (GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5), we formalize the failure modes of persona prompting under profile collision and provide an assurance harness for evaluating episodic continuity, structured state, and epistemic boundaries.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

I.2.7; I.2.4; D.2.5

arXiv:2609.22195 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.22195v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22195 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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