# Learning to Simulate Individuals from Macro Social Signals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07062 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07062/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12045/) (2024)
- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20094/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Fail on Trivial Alterations to Theory-of-Mind Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08399/) (2023)
- [LLM Agents Grounded in Self-Reports Enable General-Purpose Simulation of Individuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10109/) (2024)
- [S3: Social-network Simulation System with Large Language Model-Empowered Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14984/) (2023)
- [OASIS: Open Agent Social Interaction Simulations with One Million Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11581/) (2024)
- [The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16244/) (2024)
- [From News to Forecast: Integrating Event Analysis in LLM-Based Time Series Forecasting with Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17515/) (2024)
- [SocioVerse: A World Model for Social Simulation Powered by LLM Agents and A Pool of 10 Million Real-World Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10157/) (2025)
- [TwinMarket: A Scalable Behavioral and Social Simulation for Financial Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01506/) (2025)
- [HumanLM: Simulating Users with State Alignment Beats Response Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03303/) (2026)
- [Sotopia-RL: Reward Design for Social Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03905/) (2025)
- [Social World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00559/) (2025)
- [OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14199/) (2026)
- [DecisionFlow: Advancing Large Language Model as Principled Decision Maker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21397/) (2025)
- [SPADE: Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19197/) (2026)
- [One Adapts to Any: Meta Reward Modeling for Personalized LLM Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18731/) (2026)
- [Building Social World Models with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11482/) (2026)
- [Meet Dynamic Individual Preferences: Resolving Conflicting Human Value with Paired Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12479/) (2026)
- [What to Edit Next: Visually Aligned Image-Editing Follow-Up Suggestions in Conversational Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07565/) (2026)
- [AVA-Encoder: Towards Agent-Native Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12313/) (2026)
- [Momentum-Coupled Rubric Adaptation for Detailed Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36893/) (2026)
- [PyMETA: Evaluating Student Code Diagnosis on and Beyond the First Execution Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30610/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models are increasingly used to simulate how individuals respond to new situations, yet the behavioral reasoning behind these responses is either inherited from pretraining or learned from individual-level annotations, which offer limited behavioral diversity and little supervision of the reasoning itself. We propose to learn behavioral reasoning from prediction markets, whose price trajectories record how populations respond to real-world events at scale. We introduce macro2mind, which trains a language model with GRPO using market signals. A social behavioral decomposition makes behavioral reasoning an explicit step of forecasting: the model infers representative groups of market participants, predicts how each interprets the news and updates its beliefs, reasons about their interactions, and aggregates these responses into a price. A hindsight-regret curriculum with difficulty-aware sampling focuses training on transitions where hindsight-identified groups substantially improve the forecast while prioritizing examples that remain learnable for the current policy. The learned reasoning applies to user simulation without further training. On SWM-Bench, macro2mind achieves state-of-the-art directional accuracy and correlation on Polymarket. Trained on market data, it transfers zero-shot to four user-simulation benchmarks (Humanual, OvertonBench, PRISM, and CAD) and has competitive performance among zero-shot methods. Used as a data generator, macro2mind also raises a downstream simulator's accuracy on unseen users by 15.5 points, outperforming data generated by its backbone by 13.2 points.