The study investigates how demographic identity is represented in a language model, using representational similarity analysis against Pew survey data across 169 demographic cells. It finds that standard last‑token read‑outs underestimate the model’s fidelity, while specific attention heads (notably L11 H16) capture demographic structure more accurately, though race‑based types remain weak. Causal interventions reveal that high fidelity does not guarantee causal use, and a 128‑dimensional probe of a single head improves alignment with survey truth but fails to recover per‑question group ordering.
arXiv:2608.18768v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are widely used to simulate survey respondents, yet their outputs are homogeneous and unfaithful to real inter-group differen...
arXiv:2607. 18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic-population tools increasingly run every individual as an independent large language model (LLM) agent.
Using large language models (LLMs) to simulate diverse human populations has the potential to transform many aspects of computational social science, yet many evaluations score the average response ra...
arXiv:2609.15849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can LLMs reason through new information like humans, or do they merely retrieve cached opinions? This is critical for silicon sampling, where LLM per...
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.
arXiv:2607.02368v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models prompted with cultural personas increasingly stand in for human respondents in cross-cultural research. Their responses separ...
arXiv:2603.13911v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A language model can give the wrong answer even when the correct answer is decodable from its intermediate states. To study this gap between decoda...
arXiv:2605.30381v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When a language model is fine-tuned to produce systematically incorrect responses, does this training leave a structured, linearly recoverabl...
arXiv:2607. 09306v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whether a language model behaves as it claims is a judgement on which independent human raters cannot agree (Fleiss kappa = 0.
arXiv:2607. 13568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a language model estimate its familiarity with an entity before generating an answer?
arXiv:2606. 05976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work shows that LLM agents struggle to correct errors in their own reasoning traces yet show markedly higher correction rates when identical claims appear under external sources.
Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit sycophancy, where they agree with a user's statement even when incorrect. While sycophancy is often treated as a single defined behavior, it can manifest in substantially distinct ways and circumstances, raising the question of whether this multi-faceted nature is reflected in its internal mechanisms.