Pith Number

pith:VVBG2CSP

pith:2026:VVBG2CSPJQNYRMLX7VTQAUXQE6

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

PICon: A Multi-Turn Interrogation Framework for Evaluating Persona Agent Consistency

Chaeeun Shim, Edward Choi, Hwajung Hong, Junhee Lee, Junseong Choi, Minseo Kim, Sujeong Im

Persona agents exhibit more contradictions than humans when tested with chained multi-turn questions.

arxiv:2603.25620 v4 · 2026-03-26 · cs.CL

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{VVBG2CSPJQNYRMLX7VTQAUXQE6}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

even systems previously reported as highly consistent fail to meet the human baseline across all three dimensions, revealing contradictions and evasive responses under chained questioning.

C2weakest assumption

That the specific multi-turn interrogation protocol fairly measures consistency without LLM-specific biases such as prompt sensitivity or tendencies to evade that differ from human response patterns.

C3one line summary

PICon demonstrates that even highly regarded LLM persona agents exhibit more contradictions and evasive responses than real humans across internal, external, and retest consistency dimensions under chained interrogation.

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T01:05:11.891120Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

ad426d0a4f4c1b88b177fd670052f027b207f10daa7bbd115af816b10619c878

Aliases

arxiv: 2603.25620 · arxiv_version: 2603.25620v4 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2603.25620 · pith_short_12: VVBG2CSPJQNY · pith_short_16: VVBG2CSPJQNYRMLX · pith_short_8: VVBG2CSP

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/VVBG2CSPJQNYRMLX7VTQAUXQE6 \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: ad426d0a4f4c1b88b177fd670052f027b207f10daa7bbd115af816b10619c878

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "8e3575341e6d0506e6ea3b8df1a8eae5910ccd6014d316ee488c376e332346fa",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-03-26T16:34:34Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "a4188de57f9e5565a75cf4eab6c1064f1079e232f8c51c82fa8cbdd6e3fae103"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2603.25620",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 4
  }
}