LLM生成社交网络时,提示设计比模型大小更关键,影响真实社会结构的模拟效果。
When Do LLMs Generate Realistic Social Networks? A Multi-Dimensional Study of Culture, Language, Scale, and Method

- 设计四种不同提示机制,模拟人际连接形成过程。
- 文化与语言显著改变宗教同质性,政治倾向主导多数方法下的关系生成。
- 小模型表现迥异于大模型,提示语言可引发系统性偏差,适合研究社会模拟的可信度。
大型语言模型(LLMs)正被广泛用于行为模拟中替代人类参与者,包括合成社交网络生成。然而,其关系输出如何受提示设计、文化背景、提示语言和模型规模影响仍不明确。基于同质性理论与结构平衡理论,我们形式化了四种基于LLM的边生成机制:顺序式、全局式、局部式和迭代式,并将其视为边集上的不同条件分布。使用50个具有人口学特征的人物角色,在四种文化语境、四种提示语言、三种GPT-4.1变体及四种提示架构下,共生成192个经验证的有向网络,每组条件重复两次。结果发现,文化框架改变了内婚式同质性和最大连通组件的连通性;政治归属在三种方法中主导关系形成,而全局方法则替代了年龄因素,表明提示架构是实质性的社会学变量。模型规模带来稳定差异排序,最小版本表现出质的不同而非仅噪声增加。提示语言本身显著改变宗教同质性,尤其在印地语提示下,但对政治同质性几乎无影响。生成网络在聚类系数和模块度上优于标准图基线,但仍包含高于实证水平的人口学偏见。这些结果表明,通常被视为实现细节的提示选择,实际上编码了实质性社会学假设。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as substitutes for human subjects in behavioral simulations, including synthetic social network generation. Yet it remains unclear how their relational outputs depend on prompt design, cultural framing, prompt language, and model scale. Building on homophily theory and structural balance theory, we formalize four LLM-based tie-formation mechanisms: sequential, global, local, and iterative, and treat them as distinct conditional distributions over edge sets. Using a fixed roster of 50 demographically grounded personas, we generate 192 verified directed networks across four cultural contexts, four prompt languages, three GPT-4.1 variants, and four prompting architectures, with two seeds per condition. We find that cultural framing shifts inbreeding homophily and largest-component connectivity. Political affiliation dominates tie formation under three methods, while the global method substitutes age, showing that prompt architecture functions as a substantive sociological variable. Model scale produces a stable divergence ranking, with the smallest variant behaving qualitatively differently rather than merely noisily. Prompt language alone sharply shifts religion homophily, especially under Hindi prompting, while leaving political homophily nearly invariant. LLM-generated networks match real social graphs on clustering and modularity better than standard graph baselines, yet encode demographic biases above empirical levels. These results show that prompt choices often treated as implementation details encode substantive sociological assumptions.
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