arXiv Machine Learning

When Can You Trust Your Synthetic Users? Diagnostics and Corrections for LLM Consumer Panels

arXiv AI
4d ago

Synthetic Data in Marketing Research: How to Evaluate and When to Trust

The paper discusses the use of synthetic data in marketing research, arguing that the key question is not whether synthetic respondents work, but when they do. It categorizes synthetic data into three types—ungrounded LLM responses, segment-level personas, and individual-level digital twins—and maps each to the decisions they can support. The authors also propose a taxonomy of accuracy measures, highlight the forgotten question problem, and introduce an ex‑ante answerability diagnostic based on R² to improve twin-human correlation.

By Oded Netzer, Rajan Sambandam
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Synthetic minority data is redundant or invalid: a data-dependent validity theory and a de-biased test

arXiv:2607. 20787v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For two decades, the standard remedy for class-imbalanced learning has been to fabricate synthetic minority examples, and the standard evidence of their validity has been a check that cannot fail: synthetic points are scored against the very data that generated them.

By Ahmad B. Hassanat, Ahmad S. Tarawneh, Ghada A. Altarawneh
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Accuracy Is Not Enough: A Cross-Architecture Audit of Demographic Bias in Deep Knowledge Tracing

The study audits demographic bias across four deep knowledge tracing architectures—DKT, DKVMN, SAKT, and AKT—using two large public datasets (Eedi and OULAD). It finds that bias is context‑dependent: socioeconomic bias is significant on Eedi, while gender bias appears on OULAD for most models. The most accurate model, AKT, also exhibits the greatest bias, and standard mitigation techniques such as reweighting and adversarial debiasing fail to reduce bias without sacrificing accuracy.

By Dang Quang Minh, Nguyen Dung Son, Nguyen Huu Loi, Truong Viet Vu, Nguyen Thai Anh
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Distributional Validity and Calibration of a Korean Synthetic Persona Panel for Digital and AI Service Use: A Secondary-Data Validation Against the Korea Media Panel Survey

The study evaluates a Korean synthetic persona panel (NVIDIA Nemotron‑Personas‑Korea) conditioned on Gemini 3.5 Flash and EXAONE against the KISDI Korea Media Panel Survey. Across eight digital‑AI service‑use indicators and eight innovativeness constructs, the panels achieved mean absolute errors of 15–19 pp, with segment‑level errors up to 52.4 pp and correlation coefficients between 0.69 and 0.90. Holdout calibration reduced sex‑by‑age cell errors but still lagged behind direct real‑data estimation, indicating that synthetic panels are useful diagnostically but not as survey substitutes.

By Howard Kim, Keun Tae Cho
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Rethinking Verbalized Confidence for LLM-as-a-Judge: A Compatibility Shift on Post-2025 Proprietary Models

The paper argues that verbalized confidence—once viewed as overconfident and coarse—has become the preferred soft‑scoring method for LLM‑as‑a‑Judge on top‑tier proprietary models released after 2025. Experiments on SummEval, AggreFact, and HelpSteer2 across up to 18 LLMs show that log‑probabilities are no longer the best signal, and that adding an overconfidence advisory and self‑debate further improves calibration and robustness. The authors note that these enhancements incur little accuracy loss on post‑2025 models but do affect pre‑2025 ones, highlighting a compatibility shift in how confidence should be measured.

By Yu-Chung Hsiao