Population-Aligned Persona Generation for LLM-based Social Simulation
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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.
arXiv:2610.05828v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for public opinion research by enabling early prediction of survey responses, potentially redu...
The paper introduces the concept of Persona Collapse, where large language models (LLMs) produce clustered, non-diverse responses in multi-agent simulations. It defines three diagnostic metrics—Coverage, Uniformity, and Complexity—to quantify this phenomenon across eight LLMs on tasks such as personality, moral reasoning, and self-introduction. Findings show that persona collapse is universal but varies by task, cannot be alleviated by sampling more personas, and that higher per-persona fidelity leads to more polarized populations, while persona-targeted fine-tuning further reduces diversity.
The paper introduces a simulation framework that uses large language model (LLM) agents conditioned on data‑driven personas to predict A/B test outcomes. These personas are built from anonymized user behavioral patterns, engagement signals, and inferred demographics, offering a more realistic population model than synthetic or rule‑based personas. The authors evaluate question design, persona data source, behavioral depth versus diversity, and population subsampling, achieving 0.75–0.90 directional accuracy on 40 real A/B tests.
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,...
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.