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Benchmarking Distributional Alignment of Large Language Models

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arxiv 2411.05403 v1 pith:QQ3ZVXB3 submitted 2024-11-08 cs.CL cs.AI

classification cs.CLcs.AI
keywords distributionalignmentdistributionalgrouplanguagemethodmodelsopinion
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Language models (LMs) are increasingly used as simulacra for people, yet their ability to match the distribution of views of a specific demographic group and be \textit{distributionally aligned} remains uncertain. This notion of distributional alignment is complex, as there is significant variation in the types of attributes that are simulated. Prior works have underexplored the role of three critical variables -- the question domain, steering method, and distribution expression method -- which motivates our contribution of a benchmark explicitly addressing these dimensions. We construct a dataset expanding beyond political values, create human baselines for this task, and evaluate the extent to which an LM can align with a particular group's opinion distribution to inform design choices of such simulation systems. Our analysis reveals open problems regarding if, and how, LMs can be used to simulate humans, and that LLMs can more accurately describe the opinion distribution than simulate such distributions.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Partition, Prompt, Aggregate: Statistical Self-Consistency in Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    LLM probability estimates violate the law of total probability across partitions, and subgroup-aggregated estimates often beat direct population-level estimates (the macro fallacy).

  2. Video2Reaction: Mapping Video to Audience Reaction Distribution in the Wild

    cs.CV 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new dataset and benchmark maps movie clips to distributions of audience emotional reactions derived from YouTube comments, showing that finetuned vision-language models can predict these distributions from video alone.

  3. The Pluralistic Moral Gap: Understanding Judgment and Value Differences between Humans and Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLMs align with human moral judgments only under high consensus, concentrate on a narrow set of moral values, and the profile-based prompting method's reported improvement is evaluated in-sample.

  4. Using LLMs to Advance the Cognitive Science of Collectives

    q-bio.NC 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A position paper arguing that LLMs can help cognitive scientists study collective behavior along structural, interactional, and individual complexity axes, with cautions about bias and reproducibility.

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