FATE-5: Faithful Alignment of Trait Expression for Continuous Big Five Personality Control

Abstract

Controlling personality in large language models is important for building conversational agents that can be customized to different users and interaction settings. However, existing personality control methods often face a tradeoff between strong trait expression and natural dialogue generation. We introduce FATE-5, Faithful Alignment of Trait Expression for the Big Five, a two-stage framework that separates personality encoding from naturalness alignment. FATE-5 first learns continuous soft prompt representations of Big Five profiles using dialogue supervision and an auxiliary survey objective. It then improves dialogue naturalness through preference alignment based on both dialogue quality and personality agreement. Across three language model backbones, FATE-5 maintains strong trait expression while achieving substantially higher dialogue naturalness than other trait-strong methods. On held-out questionnaires, it achieves monotonicity correlations of 0.97-0.99 and recovery RMSE of 8.9-12.4, substantially improving over the evaluated baselines. These results demonstrate effective continuous personality control while maintaining natural conversational behavior.