Predicting how a population will answer a new question is a long-standing goal. Statistical methods succeed at the level of the mass but falter at the level of the individual.
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: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
arXiv:2510. 01171v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-training alignment often reduces LLM diversity, leading to a phenomenon known as mode collapse.
By Jiayi Zhang, Simon Yu, Derek Chong, Anthony Sicilia, Michael R. Tomz, Christopher D. Manning, Weiyan Shi
arXiv:2609.22607v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We argue here that the current dominant practice in LLM human simulation: prompting instruction-tuned assistant language models to role-play personas,...
By Minwoo Kang, T\'ea Wright, Seun Eisape, Ayush Raj, Suhong Moon, Joseph Suh, Alane Suhr, David M. Chan, John Canny
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