arXiv:2509.11311cs.AIcs.CY2025-09被引 1

用少量大模型模拟人类偏好,无需训练也不碰隐私数据。

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

  • 构建多模型代理池,通过智能提示和采样覆盖潜在偏好空间
  • 用加权平均使模型集体回答逼近真实人群数据,误差仅0.014
  • 只需API调用成本,适合跨地区社会研究,省时省力

大型语言模型越来越多地被用作社会科学中的虚拟人类参与者,但其外部有效性要求这些合成代理能真实反映目标人群的偏好。本文提出偏好重构理论,将偏好对齐建模为表示学习问题:构建一组代理函数基,并通过加权聚合恢复群体偏好。基于此,我们实现了一个模块化两阶段系统——“提示转代理(P2P)”。第一阶段利用结构化提示与基于熵的自适应采样,构建涵盖潜在偏好空间的多样化代理池;第二阶段采用L1正则化回归,筛选出一个紧凑的模型集合,使其集体响应分布与目标人群的真实数据高度一致。该方法无需微调,也不需访问敏感人口统计信息,仅产生API推理开销。我们在美国趋势面板(American Trends Panel)14轮调查中验证了该方法,跨多个主题的平均测试均方误差为0.014,每份问卷成本约0.8美元。此外,在世界价值观调查(World Values Survey)上也展示了其跨地域泛化潜力。在对抗微调对齐基线的强度测试中,P2P仅使用不到3%的训练数据即达到可比性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Large language models are increasingly used as proxies for human subjects in social science research, yet external validity requires that synthetic agents faithfully reflect the preferences of target human populations. We introduce *preference reconstruction theory*, a framework that formalizes preference alignment as a representation learning problem: constructing a functional basis of proxy agents and recovering population preferences through weighted aggregation. We implement this via *Prompts to Proxies* ($\texttt{P2P}$), a modular two-stage system. Stage 1 uses structured prompting with entropy-based adaptive sampling to construct a diverse agent pool spanning the latent preference space. Stage 2 employs L1-regularized regression to select a compact ensemble whose aggregate response distributions align with observed data from the target population. $\texttt{P2P}$ requires no finetuning and no access to sensitive demographic data, incurring only API inference costs. We validate the approach on 14 waves of the American Trends Panel, achieving an average test MSE of 0.014 across diverse topics at approximately 0.8 USD per survey. We additionally test it on the World Values Survey, demonstrating its potential to generalize across locales. When stress-tested against an SFT-aligned baseline, $\texttt{P2P}$ achieves competitive performance using less than 3% of the training data.

大模型代理偏好建模社会科学研究

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