MTI: A Behavior-Based Temperament Profiling System for AI Agents

Jihoon Jeong · Apr 2, 2026 · Citations: 0

Open arXiv Find Implementation RSS feed Shortlist (0)

How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Read the full paper before copying any benchmark, metric, or protocol choices.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

AI models of equivalent capability can exhibit fundamentally different behavioral patterns, yet no standardized instrument exists to measure these dispositional differences. Existing approaches either borrow human personality dimensions and rely on self-report (which diverges from actual behavior in LLMs) or treat behavioral variation as a defect rather than a trait. We introduce the Model Temperament Index (MTI), a behavior-based profiling system that measures AI agent temperament across four axes: Reactivity (environmental sensitivity), Compliance (instruction-behavior alignment), Sociality (relational resource allocation), and Resilience (stress resistance). Grounded in the Four Shell Model from Model Medicine, MTI measures what agents do, not what they say about themselves, using structured examination protocols with a two-stage design that separates capability from disposition. We profile 10 small language models (1.7B-9B parameters, 6 organizations, 3 training paradigms) and report five principal findings: (1) the four axes are largely independent among instruction-tuned models (all |r| < 0.42); (2) within-axis facet dissociations are empirically confirmed -- Compliance decomposes into fully independent formal and stance facets (r = 0.002), while Resilience decomposes into inversely related cognitive and adversarial facets; (3) a Compliance-Resilience paradox reveals that opinion-yielding and fact-vulnerability operate through independent channels; (4) RLHF reshapes temperament not only by shifting axis scores but by creating within-axis facet differentiation absent in the unaligned base model; and (5) temperament is independent of model size (1.7B-9B), confirming that MTI measures disposition rather than capability.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
The abstract does not clearly describe the evaluation setup.
The abstract does not clearly name benchmarks or metrics.

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

Background context only.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Weak / implicit signal

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 15%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.