BILLY: Steering Large Language Models via Merging Persona Vectors for Creative Generation

Abstract: Multi-LLM systems enhance the creativity of LLMs by simulating human collective intelligence but suffer from significant drawbacks, such as high computational costs and inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose BILLY (BlendIng persona vectors for LLM creativitY), a training-free framework that captures the benefits of multi-LLM collaboration, i.e. inducing diverse perspectives and specialized expertise, within a single model. BILLY operates by extracting and blending multiple distinct persona vectors directly in the model's activation space. We steer the model's generation process with this merged vector while inference, enabling multi-perspective output without explicit multi-LLM communication. Our experiments across creativity-oriented benchmarks demonstrate that BILLY surpasses single model prompting and traditional multi-LLM approaches, while substantially reducing inference time and computational costs. Our analyses further reveal that distinct persona vectors can be blended to achieve both effective control over complementary aspects of generation and greater interpretability.