Related papers: The Need for a Socially-Grounded Persona Framework…

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as interactive social agents, yet their ability to maintain coherent and authentic persona-level role-playing remains limited, particularly in realistic social scenarios. Existing research…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human users in interactive settings such as therapy, education, and social role-play. While these simulations enable scalable training and evaluation of AI agents, off-the-shelf…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior, but their ability to simulate $individual$ privacy decisions is not well understood. In this paper, we address the problem of evaluating whether a core set of…

Effective community governance hinges on understanding what specific residents think and need. Recent work has used large language models (LLMs) to simulate human respondents, offering a scalable, reproducible way to study human attitudes…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed for simulating human behaviors across diverse domains. However, our position is that current LLM-based human simulations remain insufficiently reliable, as evidenced by significant…

Patient simulation is essential for developing and evaluating mental health dialogue systems. As most existing approaches rely on snapshot-style prompts with limited profile information, homogeneous behaviors and incoherent disease…

User simulation is increasingly vital to develop and evaluate recommender systems (RSs). While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising avenues to simulate user behavior, they often struggle with the absence of specific task alignment…

Background: The deployment of personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) is currently constrained by the stability-plasticity dilemma. Prevailing alignment methods, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), rely on stochastic weight updates that…

Population synthesis is essential for individual-level simulation in transport planning and socio-economic analysis, yet remains challenging due to the need to capture both statistical dependencies and high-level behavioral semantics.…

Machine learning can predict human behavior well when substantial structured data and well-defined outcomes are available, but these models are typically limited to specific outcomes and cannot readily be applied to new domains. We test…

Persona-assigned large language models (LLMs) are used in domains such as education, healthcare, and sociodemographic simulation. Yet, they are typically evaluated only in short, single-round settings that do not reflect real-world usage.…

Accurately simulating the decisions of a specific individual remains challenging for large language models (LLMs), partly because persona information is often provided as static descriptions that miss the values, experiences, and contextual…

We present a comparative docking experiment that aligns human-subject interview data with large language model (LLM)-driven synthetic personas to evaluate fidelity, divergence, and blind spots in AI-enabled simulation. Fifteen early-stage…

Large language models (LLMs) offer emerging opportunities for psychological and behavioral research, but methodological guidance is lacking. This article provides a framework for using LLMs as psychological simulators across two primary…

Questionnaire-based surveys are foundational to social science research and public policymaking, yet traditional survey methods remain costly, time-consuming, and often limited in scale. Although prior work has explored large language…

This paper examines biases in large language models (LLMs) when generating synthetic populations from responses to personality questionnaires. Using five LLMs, we first assess the representativeness and potential biases in the…

One way to personalize and steer generations from large language models (LLM) is to assign a persona: a role that describes how the user expects the LLM to behave (e.g., a helpful assistant, a teacher, a woman). This paper investigates how…

Digital personas powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as substitutes for human survey respondents, yet it remains unclear when they can reliably approximate human survey findings. We answer this question using…

A long-standing challenge in developing accurate recommendation models is simulating user behavior, mainly due to the complex and stochastic nature of user interactions. Towards this, one promising line of work has been the use of Large…

Surveys provide valuable insights into public opinion and behavior, but their execution is costly and slow. Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as a scalable, low-cost substitute for human respondents, but their outputs are…