# Decoupling Logic from Persona: Structural Immunity of Edge LLM Agents to Context Pollution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09772 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09772/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 10 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00861/) (2021)
- [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13548/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06120/) (2025)
- [Bias Runs Deep: Implicit Reasoning Biases in Persona-Assigned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04892/) (2023)
- [S-LoRA: Serving Thousands of Concurrent LoRA Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03285/) (2023)
- [Punica: Multi-Tenant LoRA Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18547/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Constitutional Gating and Deterministic Recovery for Multi-Agent LLM Negotiation: Ablations Against a Stateful Adversarial Gatekeeper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11542/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Edge language-model agents must hold a persona and reason correctly at once, in one context window that fills with history and persona instructions. We study what happens to the logical part of such an agent when that history is long, misleading and persona-heavy (persona-logic interference), and present a Decoupling Architecture (AO-DA) that separates logical inference ("What") from persona expression ("How") into two inference paths on one INT4 base model with hot-swappable LoRA adapters. The logic path receives only the core turn and emits a verifiable structured state (Micro-State); the persona path renders it in character with the full history. In same-base-model ablations on an Apple M2 laptop (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Gemma-3-4B-it, 4-bit; 480 runs: 2 bases x 4 pollution levels x 3 arms x 2 tasks x 2 personas x 5 seeds) we find: (i) the decoupled logic path is structurally invariant to pollution: its prompt stays at 180 (Llama) or 167 (Gemma) tokens while the mixed single-pass prompt grows from 242 to 1,203 on Llama, and its outputs are byte-identical across levels (40/40); (ii) the mixed single pass degrades monotonically (composite logic score 0.669 to 0.150 on Llama, 0.487 to 0.150 on Gemma), mostly by failing to emit the required structured output (80-95% of runs on Llama, 100% on Gemma at the two highest levels); (iii) with the same pollution fed into the logic path, the dedicated-adapter, dedicated-format path is still more robust than the single pass on the 8B model (failure 0-20% vs 25-95% at L2-L4; paired Delta +0.30 to +0.50, Cliff's δ 0.50-0.85, Holm-adjusted p ≤ 0.03) but not on the 4B model, where both collapse. Separation costs one extra decode on a topic's first turn (28.2 s vs 18.2 s on Llama) and buys persona hot-swapping in 1.7 ms (warm median) without re-running the logic path. Code, logic-path adapters, logs and analysis scripts are released.