The Severance Problem: LLMs are Unaware of the Person Beyond the Prompt
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This presentation explores a fundamental flaw in personalized AI assistants: they lack structural awareness of what they don't know about you. The Severance Problem reveals that language models suffer from meta-ignorance, operating over fragmented user context while remaining oblivious to the categories of missing information. The Severance Schema offers a simple prompt-level solution that makes unknowns explicit, dramatically reducing harmful advice and hallucination while improving safety and calibration in real-world assistance scenarios.