# K/V-Cache Interventions Dissociate Representation Alignment from Persona Expression in Decoder-Only Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11020 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11020/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01405/) (2023)
- [Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03341/) (2023)
- [Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06681/) (2023)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08112/) (2023)
- [Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21509/) (2025)
- [Prompt-Activation Duality: Improving Activation Steering via Attention-Level Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10664/) (2026)
- [Dissociating the Internal Representations of Sycophancy in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07003/) (2026)
- [When Behavioral Safety Evaluation Fails: A Representation-Level Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08044/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study K/V-cache interventions -- transplanting a target-conditioned K/V trajectory into a source-persona generation -- as a structured surface for persona control in decoder-only language models. Across 13 intervention configurations applied to Llama-3.1-8B for a fixed source-to-target persona pair, we report two consistent dissociations between representation-level alignment and behavioral expression, plus a common failure under position perturbations. First, all layer-band K/V replacements (early, mid, late) achieve strong local V-space alignment (V-gap 0.91, 0.89, 0.84), but only mid-layer replacement (layers 9-20) combines substantial target-marker expression with preserved lexical diversity. Second, full and mid-layer replacement induce comparable alignment (V-gap 0.94 vs. 0.89) yet produce different lexical-diversity profiles (TTR 0.65 vs. 0.77). Third, position perturbations (lag and shuffle) apply distinct operations yet uniformly suppress target-persona expression -- a common behavioral failure rather than a strict dissociation. Representation-level similarity metrics alone are thus not sufficient predictors of downstream persona expression in the regimes we study; the K/V cache emerges as a controllable but structurally constrained intervention surface. Because the transplanted trajectory carries the target's own generated token history, we characterize the intervention as trajectory-level transplantation rather than isolated persona-representation injection; a same-token-sequence control, decoding an identical token sequence under source vs. target conditioning, reproduces the sign and layer localization of the L28 representational shift, indicating the shift is not explained solely by imported token history. These findings characterize representation-behavior dissociation in a high-signal setting rather than establishing universality across models or persona pairs.