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Autores principales: Yu, Ziyun, Zhou, Yiru, Zhao, Chen, Wen, Hongyi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06874
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author Yu, Ziyun
Zhou, Yiru
Zhao, Chen
Wen, Hongyi
author_facet Yu, Ziyun
Zhou, Yiru
Zhao, Chen
Wen, Hongyi
contents Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate user opinions has received growing attention. Yet LLMs, especially trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), are known to exhibit biases toward dominant viewpoints, raising concerns about their ability to represent users from diverse demographic and cultural backgrounds. In this work, we examine the extent to which LLMs can simulate human responses to cross-domain survey questions through direct prompting and chain-of-thought prompting. We further propose a claim diversification method CLAIMSIM, which elicits viewpoints from LLM parametric knowledge as contextual input. Experiments on the survey question answering task indicate that, while CLAIMSIM produces more diverse responses, both approaches struggle to accurately simulate users. Further analysis reveals two key limitations: (1) LLMs tend to maintain fixed viewpoints across varying demographic features, and generate single-perspective claims; and (2) when presented with conflicting claims, LLMs struggle to reason over nuanced differences among demographic features, limiting their ability to adapt responses to specific user profiles.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06874
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Analysis of Large Language Models for Simulating User Responses in Surveys
Yu, Ziyun
Zhou, Yiru
Zhao, Chen
Wen, Hongyi
Computation and Language
Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate user opinions has received growing attention. Yet LLMs, especially trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), are known to exhibit biases toward dominant viewpoints, raising concerns about their ability to represent users from diverse demographic and cultural backgrounds. In this work, we examine the extent to which LLMs can simulate human responses to cross-domain survey questions through direct prompting and chain-of-thought prompting. We further propose a claim diversification method CLAIMSIM, which elicits viewpoints from LLM parametric knowledge as contextual input. Experiments on the survey question answering task indicate that, while CLAIMSIM produces more diverse responses, both approaches struggle to accurately simulate users. Further analysis reveals two key limitations: (1) LLMs tend to maintain fixed viewpoints across varying demographic features, and generate single-perspective claims; and (2) when presented with conflicting claims, LLMs struggle to reason over nuanced differences among demographic features, limiting their ability to adapt responses to specific user profiles.
title An Analysis of Large Language Models for Simulating User Responses in Surveys
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06874