arXiv:2509.11311 · v3

Prompts to Proxies: Emulating Human Preferences via a Compact LLM Ensemble

首次提交 2025-09-14 23:08

版本更新 2026-10-28 03:11

雷达观测 2026-10-30 10:23

摘要

Large language models are increasingly used as proxies for human subjects in social science research, yet external validity requires matching the response distributions of target human populations. We study population-level survey alignment: reconstructing aggregate survey responses from limited public survey data, without individual-level demographic profiles or model finetuning. We formalize this problem as preference reconstruction: rather than matching proxy agents to demographic profiles, we construct a functional basis of proxy agents and recover population preferences by weighted aggregation. We instantiate this idea via Prompts to Proxies ($\texttt{P2P}$), a two-stage inference-time system. Stage 1 uses structured attribute-based prompting with entropy-guided adaptive sampling to construct a diverse proxy pool spanning the latent preference space. Stage 2 employs L1-regularized regression to select a compact weighted ensemble matching observed target-population responses. Across 14 American Trends Panel waves, $\texttt{P2P}$ achieves an average test MSE of 0.014 at approximately 0.8 USD per survey, improving over prompting and demographic-conditioning baselines. On the World Values Survey, cross-locale transfer experiments show that basis expressiveness can outperform locale matching on average, while locale-specific generation helps on culturally divergent questions. A stress test against an SFT-aligned survey model shows competitive performance using less than 3\% of the training data. These results position preference reconstruction as a lightweight, externally verifiable alternative for survey-based population alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/bingchen-wang/P2P.

作者备注：Accepted for publication at NeurIPS 2026