arXiv:2606. 28963v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate social survey responses, yet their outputs exhibit systematic biases: marginal distributions are skewed, response variance is poorly calibrated, and predictor-outcome relationships are attenuated.
By Eun Cheol Choi, Youngrae Kim, Prabhu Pugalenthi, Hong-En Chen, Bo-Ruei Huang
arXiv:2606. 18263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human populations via persona prompting, often under the assumptions that richer persona descriptions improve behavioral fidelity, similarly sized attribute combinations are equally simulatable, and persona definitions generalize across tasks.
By Aanisha Bhattacharyya, Yaman Kumar Singla, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Changyou Chen, Jitendra Ajmera
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
The study evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) used as synthetic personas can predict real audience responses to marketing copy. Using thousands of headline A/B tests from the Upworthy Research Archive, the authors compare a ten-persona panel grounded in real audience demographics to a no-persona zero‑shot baseline that asks the model for a typical reader’s click likelihood. Results show that the no‑persona baseline outperforms the persona‑based approach, with higher predictive validity and top‑1 accuracy, indicating that forcing the model to role‑play specific personas introduces bias and noise.
By Alexandre Cristov\~ao Maiorano
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:2607. 26348v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic users, stand-ins for human respondents whose simulated answers feed product, policy, and market decisions.
By Zihan Chen, Di Zhu, Lei Nico Zheng
arXiv:2411. 10109v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning can predict human behavior well when substantial structured data are available for well-defined outcomes.
By Joon Sung Park, Carolyn Q. Zou, Jonne Kamphorst, Niles Egan, Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill, Carrie Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang, Robb Willer, Michael S. Bernstein
arXiv:2606. 14199v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation.
By Xuhui Zhou, Weiwei Sun, Weihua Du, Jiarui Liu, Haojia Sun, Qianou Ma, Tongshuang Wu, Yiming Yang, Maarten Sap
The study introduces a World Values Survey–grounded simulation framework to test whether large language model agents can faithfully represent diverse human value systems. In about 4,000 conversations with 1,200 personas across three models, more than half of the agents failed to express their assigned value profiles from the start, and only 2–7% drifted over time. The results show systematic deviations from the intended value distributions and reveal that simulated dialogues differ from human discussions in their balance of stylistic consistency and semantic diversity.
By Farah Atif, Sougata Saha, Monojit Choudhury
arXiv:2607. 25292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Silicon sampling uses language models as proxies for human survey respondents, treating each model call as an independent draw from the persona's response distribution.
By Chaemin Jang, Dongman Lee, Jihee Kim
arXiv:2608. 00023v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Social simulations built from language-model agents need role-conditioned behavior that can be checked before agents are placed into a simulated population.
By Isaac Song, Mohammed Rehan Parwani, Glenn Matlin, Emile Anand, Akhil Theerthala, Arjun Chatterjee, Anthony Wen-Ming Zang, Maria Kostylew, Yonadav G. Shavit, Sebastien Krier, Mark Riedl
arXiv:2604. 02458v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human responses and estimate treatment effect of interventions when real-world experiments are costly or infeasible.
By Zonghan Li, Feng Ji