arXiv AI

More Is Not More: What Matters for Diversity in LLM Opinions?

arXiv:2607. 20429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to simulate diverse human opinions in open-ended tasks such as synthetic surveys, focus group modeling, and public opinion prediction.

arXiv AI
4d ago

Population Fidelity: Evaluating Population Representativeness in LLMs

The paper introduces Population Fidelity, an evaluation framework for assessing how well large language models (LLMs) represent human population attitudes. It focuses on three dimensions: group-level accuracy, between-group variation, and the structure of that variation. Using the framework, the authors replicate a prior study on machine bias and test cultural fine-tuning, finding that while fine-tuning improves overall alignment, it does not enhance representation of within-population differences.

By Neemias B. da Silva, Martin Lukk, Ali Sutani, Abhishek Moturu, Harris Yang, Daniel Silver, Matt Ratto, Thiago H. Silva
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

On the Effect of Sampling Diversity in Scaling LLM Inference

arXiv:2502. 11027v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) scaling inference is key to unlocking greater performance, and leveraging diversity has proven an effective way to enhance it.

By Tianchun Wang, Zichuan Liu, Yuanzhou Chen, Jonathan Light, Weiyang Liu, Haifeng Chen, Xiang Zhang, Wei Cheng
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Demystifying Multi-Agent Debate: The Role of Confidence and Diversity

arXiv:2601. 19921v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) is widely used to improve large language model (LLM) performance through test-time scaling, yet recent work shows that vanilla MAD often underperforms simple majority vote despite higher computational cost.

By Xiaochen Zhu, Caiqi Zhang, Yizhou Chi, Tom Stafford, Nigel Collier, Andreas Vlachos
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Emulate or Estimate? The Divergent Strengths of Base and Post-Trained Language Models for Opinion Simulation

arXiv:2608. 03044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to simulate human opinions, but prior work reports conflicting results: some studies find promising alignment with human survey data, while others find persona collapse and weak demographic sensitivity.

By Seth Grief-Albert, Jessica Bo, Difan Jiao, Ashton Anderson
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