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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...
arXiv:2605.10659v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Digital personas powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as substitutes for human survey respondents, yet it remains uncl...
The paper investigates how persona prompting—using short textual descriptions of individuals—to align large language models (LLMs) with human survey responses. It examines the impact of selecting different persona attributes and finds that not all attribute combinations improve performance, suggesting that the variation in human responses to survey questions may explain mixed results. The study evaluates multiple attribute selection methods across four social surveys, two countries, six LLMs, and twenty prediction tasks, offering guidance on when persona prompting is beneficial and which attribute choices are most effective.
The paper proposes a method for culturally aligning large language models (LLMs) using soft prompt tuning optimized via Differential Evolution (DE). Unlike traditional fine‑tuning or reinforcement learning, this approach keeps model weights frozen and requires no preference data, instead leveraging aggregated survey scores from Hofstede's Value Survey Module (VSM13). Experiments on four countries and four instruction‑tuned models show that DE‑optimized prompts reduce cultural discrepancy, improve agreement with the World Values Survey, and are preferred in blinded pairwise evaluations by LLM judges.
The paper introduces Prompts to Proxies (P2P), a two‑stage inference‑time system that uses structured attribute‑based prompting and entropy‑guided sampling to build a diverse proxy pool, followed by L1‑regularized regression to create a compact weighted ensemble that matches aggregate survey responses. P2P achieves low mean squared error on American Trends Panel data and competitive performance on World Values Survey cross‑locale experiments, outperforming baseline prompting and demographic‑conditioning methods while using minimal training data. The authors argue that this preference reconstruction approach offers a lightweight, externally verifiable alternative for aligning large language model proxies with target human populations.
The paper introduces DIAL, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) as judges while mitigating position bias and aligning their judgments with human preferences. DIAL separates judge‑specific position effects, learns shared structure in debiased LLM preferences, and adaptively calibrates this structure toward human targets using limited human comparisons. Experiments on simulations and three human‑preference benchmarks show that DIAL remains robust to unbalanced response order, achieves strong human‑aligned rankings with few labels, and adapts when LLM information is imperfect, supported by a real‑data study of over 410K judgments from 21 LLM judges.