mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Data-Driven Personas for Survey Simulation: Insights into Simulation Alignment Across Data-Access Regimes

arXiv 2610.05828 ↗First posted 5 Oct 2026cs.AIcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for public opinion research by enabling early prediction of survey responses, potentially reducing the cost and time of traditional surveys. However, many existing steering approaches rely on target-domain human data for fine-tuning or prompting that is costly to collect and raises privacy concerns. In this paper, we study demographic group-level survey simulation, where personas induced from heterogeneous, anonymized public behavioral data condition agents that simulate responses of individuals from specific demographic groups. We examine whether representative personas can be induced from diverse sources and analyze how the domain, scale, and granularity of the source data affect survey simulation alignment. We find that personas induced from out-of-domain sources rarely outperform simulations conditioned only on basic demographic information, largely due to population mismatch. However, when personas are accurately assigned to the target demographic groups, alignment improves substantially. Finally, personas induced from target-domain survey data generalize better as more survey question history becomes available, suggesting that richer behavioral evidence enables more stable persona trait inference that transfers to better unseen questions simulation alignment.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

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References · 26

  1. 2023Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?cited by 773
  2. 2022Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samplescited by 752
  3. 2022Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studiescited by 515
  4. 2024Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personascited by 417
  5. 2023Large Language Models Empowered Agent-based Modeling and Simulation: A Survey and Perspectivescited by 257
  6. 2024Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalizationcited by 208
  7. 2023User Behavior Simulation with Large Language Model based Agentscited by 140
  8. 2023Aligning Language Models to User Opinionscited by 99
  9. 2023CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulationscited by 97
  10. 2022Moral Mimicry: Large Language Models Produce Moral Rationalizations Tailored to Political Identitycited by 74
  11. 2025Language Model Fine-Tuning on Scaled Survey Data for Predicting Distributions of Public Opinionscited by 66
  12. 2024Benchmarking Distributional Alignment of Large Language Modelscited by 61
14 more
  1. 2025Specializing Large Language Models to Simulate Survey Response Distributions for Global Populationscited by 53
  2. 2024Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstoriescited by 51
  3. 2024Persona-DB: Efficient Large Language Model Personalization for Response Prediction with Collaborative Data Refinementcited by 49
  4. 2024Random Silicon Sampling: Simulating Human Sub-Population Opinion Using a Large Language Model Based on Group-Level Demographic Informationcited by 49
  5. 2023AI-Augmented Surveys: Leveraging Large Language Models and Surveys for Opinion Predictioncited by 48
  6. 2024Evaluating Large Language Models as Generative User Simulators for Conversational Recommendationcited by 48
  7. 2025Finetuning LLMs for Human Behavior Prediction in Social Science Experimentscited by 39
  8. 2024Evaluating Cultural Adaptability of a Large Language Model via Simulation of Synthetic Personascited by 37
  9. 2024LLMs generate structurally realistic social networks but overestimate political homophilycited by 33
  10. 2024Few-shot Personalization of LLMs with Mis-aligned Responsescited by 32
  11. 2024'Simulacrum of Stories': Examining Large Language Models as Qualitative Research Participantscited by 28
  12. 2025PAARS: Persona Aligned Agentic Retail Shopperscited by 15
  13. 2026RADIUS: Ranking, Distribution, and Significance - A Comprehensive Alignment Suite for Survey Simulationcited by 1
  14. 2026Data-Driven Persona-Conditioned Agents for A/B Test Simulationcited by 1

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