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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05828 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05828/

## 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.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06899/) (2022)
- [Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans and Replicate Human Subject Studies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10264/) (2022)
- [Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20094/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Empowered Agent-based Modeling and Simulation: A Survey and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11970/) (2023)
- [Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01171/) (2024)
- [User Behavior Simulation with Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02552/) (2023)
- [Aligning Language Models to User Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14929/) (2023)
- [CoMPosT: Characterizing and Evaluating Caricature in LLM Simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11501/) (2023)
- [Moral Mimicry: Large Language Models Produce Moral Rationalizations Tailored to Political Identity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12106/) (2022)
- [Language Model Fine-Tuning on Scaled Survey Data for Predicting Distributions of Public Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16761/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Distributional Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05403/) (2024)
- [Specializing Large Language Models to Simulate Survey Response Distributions for Global Populations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07068/) (2025)
- [Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06576/) (2024)
- [Persona-DB: Efficient Large Language Model Personalization for Response Prediction with Collaborative Data Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11060/) (2024)
- [Random Silicon Sampling: Simulating Human Sub-Population Opinion Using a Large Language Model Based on Group-Level Demographic Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18144/) (2024)
- [AI-Augmented Surveys: Leveraging Large Language Models and Surveys for Opinion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09620/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models as Generative User Simulators for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09738/) (2024)
- [Finetuning LLMs for Human Behavior Prediction in Social Science Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05830/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Cultural Adaptability of a Large Language Model via Simulation of Synthetic Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06929/) (2024)
- [LLMs generate structurally realistic social networks but overestimate political homophily](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16629/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Personalization of LLMs with Mis-aligned Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18678/) (2024)
- ['Simulacrum of Stories': Examining Large Language Models as Qualitative Research Participants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19430/) (2024)
- [PAARS: Persona Aligned Agentic Retail Shoppers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24228/) (2025)
- [RADIUS: Ranking, Distribution, and Significance - A Comprehensive Alignment Suite for Survey Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19002/) (2026)
- [Data-Driven Persona-Conditioned Agents for A/B Test Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01038/) (2026)

## 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.