Epistemic status: These are first positive results. I have not yet run extensive tests to verify repeatability, so take them with a grain of salt. This post is meant to disseminate early results and collect ideas for further experiments to concretise these findings.

Tldr:

I study whether LLMs understand their training data and can use that understanding to make inferences about later training data. Specifically, I measure whether LLMs can infer which declarative facts in their training data are relevant to the current context and then leverage them. I show that finetuning LLMs on declarative data describing different personas reduces the number of iterative finetuning steps (a proxy for reinforcement learning) required to display behaviour sufficiently in line with one of the personas (Experiment 2a). I further show such iterative finetuning leads to an increase in the LLM self-identifying with the name and behaviour of the correct persona (Experiment [...]