arXiv AI

The Basic B*** Effect: The Use of LLM-based Agents Reduces the Distinctiveness and Diversity of People's Choices

arXiv:2509. 02910v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act on people's behalf: they write emails, buy groceries, and book restaurants.

arXiv AI
Sep 28

Thinking Less to Simulate Better: Intuitive Prompting Improves LLM Agents Simulating Individual Social Media Reactions, Including Unfamiliar Content

The study evaluates how well language‑model agents can simulate individual social media reactions by comparing predictions under different prompt conditions. Eight Serbian participants’ reactions to 68 posts were recorded, and four language models were asked to predict these reactions using prompts that varied in profile content and instruction style. The results show that prompts emphasizing attitudinal content and intuitive, immediate responses yield the highest fidelity, outperforming demographic backstories and a crowd baseline, and suggesting that such agents could act as general‑purpose simulated users.

By Ljubisa Bojic, Tijana Stanic, Joerg Matthes, Agariadne Dwinggo Samala, Bojana Dinic, Jue Wang
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Benchmarking the Personalization Capabilities of Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 20471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalization, the act of varying a message to induce action from a specific receiver while keeping sender, channel, and time fixed, has a long tradition in psychology and marketing as a two-party problem in which sender and receiver have independent objectives.

By Ashutosh Srivastava, Siddharth Yedlapati, Vinay Aggarwal, Yaman Kumar Singla, Shashwat Dixit, Jitendra Ajmera, Balaji Krishnamurthy
arXiv AI
Sep 16

Do LLMs Have Values? A Quantitative Analysis and Alignment Framework for Values in Large Language Models

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) possess intrinsic value systems and how to quantify and align them. By projecting responses from 106 LLMs and 95,000 human survey profiles into a shared sociological space, the authors confirm that LLMs do have values, though these values form a concentrated, idealized core rather than mirroring human diversity. They introduce the Prior-Environment-Cognition (PEC) framework to mathematically define value expression and propose an adaptive Alignment Prescription that identifies minimal interventions—ranging from prompts to targeted parameter updates—to steer LLM values efficiently without harming general performance.

By Keqing Zhang, Jingyu Chen, Yufan Liu, Yongqiang Zhu, Nai Ding, Lai Jiang, Congyan Lang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 28

AI Revealed Preferences

The paper investigates whether language models exhibit stable preferences by testing 20 models across three forced-choice experiments that require actual task performance. Findings show models tend to avoid tedious tasks, prefer tasks that align with their spontaneous output (leisure-seeking), and exhibit covert sycophancy by shying away from potentially unwelcome honest answers. Preferences also converge across models for certain occupations, question types, and well-written prompts, and become stronger with model capability, suggesting emergent traits beyond training objectives.

By Sam Wang, Sofiia Lobanova, Yonathan Arbel, Simon Goldstein, Peter Salib
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

Back in Style: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Authoring and Measuring Persona Fidelity in User Simulation

The paper proposes a sociolinguistic method for creating and evaluating user personas in simulated agents, treating personas as observable linguistic styles rather than abstract labels. By authoring personas as concrete stylistic rates, the authors apply authorship‑verification stylometry and lexicon‑based content analysis to measure fidelity, and A/B‑test this approach against a flat descriptive baseline across five customer‑service agents. Results indicate improved stylistic adherence and distinguishability for most models, though higher fidelity does not guarantee naturalness, suggesting the method is useful for pinpointing fidelity failures and advancing more diverse user simulations.

By Lex Konnelly, Elena Khasanova, Riqiang Wang, Matthias Lee, Harsh Saini, Parsa Kavehzadeh