arXiv AI

A Global View of How LLMs Value Human Time

arXiv AI
Jun 17

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

arXiv:2602. 09802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists.

By Manon Reusens, Sofie Goethals, Toon Calders, David Martens
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 5

Synthetic Cultural Agents from Aggregate Anchors

The paper proposes a new method for generating synthetic survey responses that uses declared aggregate preference anchors to create group-indexed choice policies, avoiding the mixing of inference-time information with pretraining associations. It introduces a parameter‑efficient adapter trained via Direct Preference Optimization to map GPS coordinates to synthetic responses, and evaluates these adapters on World Values Survey items, showing they recover imposed labels and exhibit strong correlation with GPS trust scores. The study demonstrates that anchored policies can preserve aggregate signals while not necessarily mirroring human response patterns, offering an inspectable construction and evaluation framework that separates anchor transfer from human criterion agreement.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Decision Models as Scalable Economic Surrogates that Capture Human Variation

Decision Models (DMs) are a new class of AI models that provide fast responses and output a probability distribution over a fixed set of options. In a first evaluation, 10 DMs were compared with 8 Large Language Models (LLMs) across three economic settings—a household spending survey, classic economic games, and a labour‑market field experiment. Frontier DMs, those scoring highest on general decision‑making benchmarks, reproduced human response variation more closely than LLMs in all settings, matched LLMs on modal responses in the spending survey, and were roughly ten times faster and over a hundred times cheaper than the fastest LLM.

By Maxime Saxena, Fabio Caccioli, R. Maria del Rio-Chanona
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Accurate in space, unreliable in time: how LLMs represent national cultural change

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) represent national cultural change over time, using more than two decades of World Values Survey data and the Inglehart‑Welzel cultural map. It finds that while LLMs generally place countries near their most recent surveyed positions, their representations lag behind current data, under‑capture the magnitude of change, introduce spurious movements, and rarely reproduce trajectory reversals. These temporal inaccuracies reveal a flattening effect that limits the models’ cultural awareness and raises concerns for evaluation, representational harms, and governance of culturally aware AI systems.

By Yalda Daryani, Miranda Bogen, Madeleine I. G. Daepp
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

Investigating Multi-Cultural Value Selection Biases in LLMs

The study examines how large language models (LLMs) respond to simultaneous cultural identity cues, comparing explicit country names with implicit language cues. Using World Values Survey probing and open‑ended sociopolitical generation, it finds that language cues shift responses more than explicit cues but not toward the named country’s distribution, while explicit cues produce more differentiated value changes. Across 1.6 million responses, naming a country narrows the gap to the model’s own country‑specific answers by 30–44%.

By Siddhesh Pawar, Arnav Arora, Dustin Wright, Dirk Hovy, Isabelle Augenstein
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Cultural Divergence Preservation: Diagnosing Flattening and Caricature in LLM-Simulated Survey Populations

The paper introduces Cultural Divergence Preservation (CDP), a new diagnostic for evaluating whether large language models (LLMs) preserve cross‑country differences when used as synthetic survey respondents. CDP uses a single human calibration to detect cultural flattening (reduced divergence) or caricature (increased divergence) and is shown to vary monotonically with cross‑country divergence, unlike conventional Jensen–Shannon divergence metrics. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones, prompting methods, and survey domains reveal that CDP uncovers systematic discrepancies with traditional fidelity metrics, highlighting that methods favored by those metrics can still produce strong flattening.

By Yeeun Chae, Yewon Choi, Seunghyun Lee, IL Im
arXiv AI
Oct 31

Prompts to Proxies: Emulating Human Preferences via a Compact LLM Ensemble

The paper introduces Prompts to Proxies (P2P), a two‑stage inference‑time system that uses structured attribute‑based prompting and entropy‑guided sampling to build a diverse proxy pool, followed by L1‑regularized regression to create a compact weighted ensemble that matches aggregate survey responses. P2P achieves low mean squared error on American Trends Panel data and competitive performance on World Values Survey cross‑locale experiments, outperforming baseline prompting and demographic‑conditioning methods while using minimal training data. The authors argue that this preference reconstruction approach offers a lightweight, externally verifiable alternative for aligning large language model proxies with target human populations.

By Bingchen Wang, Zi-Yu Khoo, Jingtan Wang