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:2603. 00059v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How well can AI-derived synthetic research data replicate the responses of human participants?
By Jason Miklian, Kristian Hoelscher, John E. Katsos
Researchers use synthetic survey respondents generated by large language models as substitutes for human samples, but current validation methods often compare them to human surveys in ways that may not reflect real-world consequential behaviour. The authors propose a new validation framework that requires explicit statements of how well synthetic data correspond to human behaviour, specifies which diagnostics are addressed, and demands subgroup-level validity claims to avoid misrepresentation. The framework operationalises distributional, procedural, and recognition justice dimensions and introduces within-persona counterfactual experiments, illustrated with a case study on electric vehicle charging tariffs and concluded with a reporting checklist for researchers.
By Florian Kutzner, Celina Kacperski, Laura de Moli\`ere, Edoardo Chidichimo, Min Jun Jung, Felix Patrick Sedgwick Wallis, James Kunling He
arXiv:2609.38392v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Personas used to seed LLM social simulations face a cold-start problem: existing methods lack a principled basis for deciding which attributes to inclu...
By Jinyi Ye, Yuangang Li, Chenxiao Yu, Preyashi Poddar, Priyanka Dey, Longtian Ye, Zihan Wang, Xiyang Hu, Emilio Ferrara, Yue Zhao
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: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