arXiv subjects

Markus Strohmaier

Publications and source records attributed to Markus Strohmaier.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Total Simulated Survey Error: Designing and Diagnosing Survey Responses from Large Language Models

Large Language models (LLMs), having been trained on vast amounts of human-generated data, may encode the attitudes and behaviors of these humans. As such, LLMs show promise in mimicking human-like patterns that facilitate their use in simulating people in a wide variety of contexts. One such context is using LLMs as 'silicon samples', i.e., proxies of people in answering survey questions to establish public opinion, design policies, or use as (social) scientific data. However, several critical questions of social biases, generalization, and technical limitations remain, further complicated by a vast design space open to simulation designers. Multiverse analyses might help us make sense of the impact of different design choices, however, we lack a systematic understanding of the design space of LLM-generated surveys as well as how these decisions interplay with inherent LLM limitations. Therefore, how do we systematically identify, trace, and document limitations in LLM-generated survey responses? Building on traditions in the quantitative social sciences, specifically survey methodology and measurement theory, we investigate threats to the validity of LLM-generated survey responses. To do so, we design a framework that enumerates conceptual errors and systematic biases that can occur at different stages of the survey simulation lifecycle. Our framework, called the Total Simulated Survey Error (TS2E) Framework, provides a unified and end-to-end perspective on LLM-generated survey data. The framework, illustrated through a theoretical and empirical case study, enables survey simulation designers to systematically identify and reflect on errors in LLM-generated surveys.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

When Persona Attributes Improve Population Alignment in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to predict the responses of human participants in survey panels. Towards that goal, persona prompting has recently emerged as a technique to inform and align large pretrained language models. Persona prompting refers to the practice of using short textual descriptions of 'personas' in prompts to steer the LLM's generations. Personas describe individuals through different attributes such as their socio-demographics, attitudes, or behaviors, with the aim of aligning LLMs to produce responses that correlate with the corresponding human responses. Yet, recent work has produced mixed and partly conflicting results of persona prompting without clear patterns of success and failure. Among the few consistent findings is that the selection of persona attributes matters, and that using more attributes does not necessarily lead to better performance. It remains unclear how different attribute selection methods perform and how to choose among them. In this paper, we propose that observed human response variation of a survey question is a potential explanation for the mixed performance observed so far. In addition, we compare the performance of persona prompting associated with different methods for selecting persona attributes. We evaluate these methods on four different (general) social surveys across two countries, six LLMs, and twenty prediction tasks per survey. Our work helps to identify when persona prompting can be expected to be useful in survey prediction tasks, and provides new insights on the effectiveness of different attribute selection methods for LLM-based survey prediction using persona prompting.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Voting Biases in Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) Governance

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) use token-weighted voting to allocate resources, set protocol rules, and legitimate collective decisions. Yet, support in DAO voting is strikingly concentrated. What happens inside the ballot that produces this concentration? We study DAOs' governance at the proposal-choice level, linking each choice's voting-power share to three observable features: whether it expresses an approval-oriented stance, where it appears in the choice list, and whether it is selected by the proposal author. We find that (i) author-selected choices show the strongest and most robust association with voting-power share, with a 58.8% increase relative to non-author choices; (ii) approval-oriented choices retain a positive but slightly less consistent advantage (27.1%); and (iii) first-listed choices also attract systematically higher shares, consistent with position and order effects (7.7%). Results are robust across several specifications, which include subtracting an author's own voting power from computations. We use bias descriptively, to denote systematic associations rather than proven causal distortion. The results shift attention from proposal outcomes alone to the interface and social signals through which choices are presented. In DAO governance, ordering, author signals, and vote visibility should be treated as institutional design choices, not neutral implementation details.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

The Impact of Dimensionality on the Stability of Node Embeddings

Previous work has shown that node embedding methods can produce different representations and downstream predictions across repeated training runs, even when trained on the same data with identical hyperparameters. However, the role of embedding dimensionality in this instability remains poorly understood. In this work, we systematically analyze how embedding dimensionality affects the stability of embeddings from five widely used node embedding methods: ASNE, DGI, GraphSAGE, node2vec, and VERSE. We evaluate stability from both representational and functional perspectives across a broad range of dimensions, datasets, and repeated training runs, and relate the resulting stability patterns to predictive performance. Our results show that dimensionality can substantially affect embedding stability, although the observed effects depend strongly on the embedding method and stability notion considered. While node2vec and ASNE generally became more stable at higher dimensions, GraphSAGE and VERSE often exhibited non-monotonic behavior or decreasing stability. We further find that dimensions associated with high stability do not necessarily coincide with those yielding the strongest downstream performance. Overall, our findings demonstrate that embedding dimensionality can have a substantial impact on the stability of node embeddings and downstream predictions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

QSTN: A Modular Framework for Robust Questionnaire Inference with Large Language Models

We introduce QSTN, an open-source Python framework for systematically generating responses from questionnaire-style prompts to support in-silico surveys and annotation tasks with large language models (LLMs). QSTN enables robust evaluation of questionnaire presentation, prompt perturbations, and response generation methods. Our extensive evaluation (>40 million survey responses) shows that question structure and response generation methods have a significant impact on the alignment of generated survey responses with human answers. We also find that answers can be obtained for a fraction of the compute cost, by changing the presentation method. In addition, we offer a no-code user interface that allows researchers to set up robust experiments with LLMs \emph{without coding knowledge}. We hope that QSTN will support the reproducibility and reliability of LLM-based research in the future.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

German General Social Survey Personas: A Survey-Derived Persona Prompt Collection for Population-Aligned LLM Studies

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for simulating human perspectives via persona prompting is gaining traction in computational social science. However, well-curated, empirically grounded persona collections remain scarce, limiting the accuracy and representativeness of such simulations. Here, we introduce the German General Social Survey Personas (GGSS Personas) collection, a comprehensive and representative persona prompt collection built from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). The GGSS Personas and their persona prompts are designed to be easily plugged into prompts for all types of LLMs and tasks, steering models to generate responses aligned with the underlying German population. We evaluate GGSS Personas by prompting various LLMs to simulate survey response distributions across diverse topics, demonstrating that GGSS Personas-guided LLMs outperform state-of-the-art classifiers, particularly under data scarcity. Furthermore, we analyze how the representativity and attribute selection within persona prompts affect alignment with population responses. Our findings suggest that GGSS Personas provide a potentially valuable resource for research on LLM-based social simulations that enables more systematic explorations of population-aligned persona prompting in NLP and social science research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Missing the Margins: A Systematic Literature Review on the Demographic Representativeness of LLMs

Many applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) require them to either simulate people or offer personalized functionality, making the demographic representativeness of LLMs crucial for equitable utility. At the same time, we know little about the extent to which these models actually reflect the demographic attributes and behaviors of certain groups or populations, with conflicting findings in empirical research. To shed light on this debate, we review 211 papers on the demographic representativeness of LLMs. We find that while 29% of the studies report positive conclusions on the representativeness of LLMs, 30% of these do not evaluate LLMs across multiple demographic categories or within demographic subcategories. Another 35% and 47% of the papers concluding positively fail to specify these subcategories altogether for gender and race, respectively. Of the articles that do report subcategories, fewer than half include marginalized groups in their study. Finally, more than a third of the papers do not define the target population to whom their findings apply; of those that do define it either implicitly or explicitly, a large majority study only the U.S. Taken together, our findings suggest an inflated perception of LLM representativeness in the broader community. We recommend more precise evaluation methods and comprehensive documentation of demographic attributes to ensure the responsible use of LLMs for social applications. Our annotated list of papers and analysis code is publicly available.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Do Psychometric Tests Work for Large Language Models? Evaluation of Tests on Sexism, Racism, and Morality

Psychometric tests are increasingly used to assess psychological constructs in large language models (LLMs). However, it remains unclear whether these tests -- originally developed for humans -- yield meaningful results when applied to LLMs. In this study, we systematically evaluate the reliability and validity of human psychometric tests on 17 LLMs for three constructs: sexism, racism, and morality. We find moderate reliability across multiple item and prompt variations. Validity is evaluated through both convergent (i.e., testing theory-based inter-test correlations) and ecological approaches (i.e., testing the alignment between tests scores and behavior in real-world downstream tasks). Crucially, we find that psychometric test scores do not align, and in some cases even negatively correlate with, model behavior in downstream tasks, indicating low ecological validity. Our results highlight that systematic evaluations of psychometric tests on LLMs are essential before interpreting their scores. Our findings also suggest that psychometric tests designed for humans cannot be applied directly to LLMs without adaptation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Survey Response Generation: Generating Closed-Ended Survey Responses In-Silico with Large Language Models

Many in-silico simulations of human survey responses with large language models (LLMs) focus on generating closed-ended survey responses, whereas LLMs are typically trained to generate open-ended text instead. Previous research has used a diverse range of methods for generating closed-ended survey responses with LLMs, and a standard practice remains to be identified. In this paper, we systematically investigate the impact that various Survey Response Generation Methods have on predicted survey responses. We present the results of 32 mio. simulated survey responses across 8 Survey Response Generation Methods, 4 political attitude surveys, and 10 open-weight language models. We find significant differences between the Survey Response Generation Methods in both individual-level and subpopulation-level alignment. Our results show that Restricted Generation Methods perform best overall, and that reasoning output does not consistently improve alignment. Our work underlines the significant impact that Survey Response Generation Methods have on simulated survey responses, and we develop practical recommendations on the application of Survey Response Generation Methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

What Do Temporal Graph Learning Models Learn?

Learning on temporal graphs has become a central topic in graph representation learning, with numerous benchmarks indicating the strong performance of state-of-the-art models. However, recent work has raised concerns about the reliability of benchmark results, noting issues with commonly used evaluation protocols and the surprising competitiveness of simple heuristics. This contrast raises the question of which characteristics of the underlying graphs temporal graph learning models actually use to form their predictions. We address this by systematically evaluating eight models on their ability to capture eight fundamental characteristics related to the link structure of temporal graphs. These include structural characteristics such as density, temporal patterns such as recency, and edge formation mechanisms such as homophily. Using both synthetic and real-world datasets, we analyze how well models learn these characteristics. Our findings reveal a mixed picture: models capture some characteristics well but fail to reproduce others. With this, we expose important limitations. Overall, we believe that our results provide practical insights for the application of temporal graph learning models and motivate more interpretability-driven evaluations in graph learning research.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Neural network embeddings recover value dimensions from psychometric survey items on par with human data

We demonstrate that embeddings derived from large language models, when processed with "Survey and Questionnaire Item Embeddings Differentials" (SQuID), can recover the structure of human values obtained from human rater judgments on the Revised Portrait Value Questionnaire (PVQ-RR). We compare multiple embedding models across a number of evaluation metrics including internal consistency, dimension correlations and multidimensional scaling configurations. Unlike previous approaches, SQuID addresses the challenge of obtaining negative correlations between dimensions without requiring domain-specific fine-tuning or training data re-annotation. Quantitative analysis reveals that our embedding-based approach explains 55% of variance in dimension-dimension similarities compared to human data. Multidimensional scaling configurations show alignment with pooled human data from 49 different countries. Generalizability tests across three personality inventories (IPIP, BFI-2, HEXACO) demonstrate that SQuID consistently increases correlation ranges, suggesting applicability beyond value theory. These results show that semantic embeddings can effectively replicate psychometric structures previously established through extensive human surveys. The approach offers substantial advantages in cost, scalability and flexibility while maintaining comparable quality to traditional methods. Our findings have significant implications for psychometrics and social science research, providing a complementary methodology that could expand the scope of human behavior and experience represented in measurement tools.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

The Prompt Makes the Person(a): A Systematic Evaluation of Sociodemographic Persona Prompting for Large Language Models

Persona prompting is increasingly used in large language models (LLMs) to simulate views of various sociodemographic groups. However, how a persona prompt is formulated can significantly affect outcomes, raising concerns about the fidelity of such simulations. Using five open-source LLMs, we systematically examine how different persona prompt strategies, specifically role adoption formats and demographic priming strategies, influence LLM simulations across 15 intersectional demographic groups in both open- and closed-ended tasks. Our findings show that LLMs struggle to simulate marginalized groups but that the choice of demographic priming and role adoption strategy significantly impacts their portrayal. Specifically, we find that prompting in an interview-style format and name-based priming can help reduce stereotyping and improve alignment. Surprisingly, smaller models like OLMo-2-7B outperform larger ones such as Llama-3.3-70B. Our findings offer actionable guidance for designing sociodemographic persona prompts in LLM-based simulation studies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Prompt Perturbations Reveal Human-Like Biases in Large Language Model Survey Responses

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as proxies for human subjects in social science surveys, but their reliability and susceptibility to known human-like response biases, such as central tendency, opinion floating and primacy bias are poorly understood. This work investigates the response robustness of LLMs in normative survey contexts, we test nine LLMs on questions from the World Values Survey (WVS), applying a comprehensive set of ten perturbations to both question phrasing and answer option structure, resulting in over 167,000 simulated survey interviews. In doing so, we not only reveal LLMs' vulnerabilities to perturbations but also show that all tested models exhibit a consistent recency bias, disproportionately favoring the last-presented answer option. While larger models are generally more robust, all models remain sensitive to semantic variations like paraphrasing and to combined perturbations. This underscores the critical importance of prompt design and robustness testing when using LLMs to generate synthetic survey data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Persona-driven Simulation of Voting Behavior in the European Parliament with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) display remarkable capabilities to understand or even produce political discourse but have been found to consistently exhibit a progressive left-leaning bias. At the same time, so-called persona or identity prompts have been shown to produce LLM behavior that aligns with socioeconomic groups with which the base model is not aligned. In this work, we analyze whether zero-shot persona prompting with limited information can accurately predict individual voting decisions and, by aggregation, accurately predict the positions of European groups on a diverse set of policies. We evaluate whether predictions are stable in response to counterfactual arguments, different persona prompts, and generation methods. Finally, we find that we can simulate the voting behavior of Members of the European Parliament reasonably well, achieving a weighted F1 score of approximately 0.793. Our persona dataset of politicians in the 2024 European Parliament and our code are available at the following url: https://github.com/dess-mannheim/european_parliament_simulation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Simulating Persuasive Dialogues on Meat Reduction with Generative Agents

Meat reduction benefits human and planetary health, but social norms keep meat central in shared meals. To date, the development of communication strategies that promote meat reduction while minimizing social costs has required the costly involvement of human participants at each stage of the process. We present work in progress on simulating multi-round dialogues on meat reduction between Generative Agents based on large language models (LLMs). We measure our main outcome using established psychological questionnaires based on the Theory of Planned Behavior and additionally investigate Social Costs. We find evidence that our preliminary simulations produce outcomes that are (i) consistent with theoretical expectations; and (ii) valid when compared to data from previous studies with human participants. Generative agent-based models are a promising tool for identifying novel communication strategies on meat reduction -- tailored to highly specific participant groups -- to then be tested in subsequent studies with human participants.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Local Contrastive Editing of Gender Stereotypes

Stereotypical bias encoded in language models (LMs) poses a threat to safe language technology, yet our understanding of how bias manifests in the parameters of LMs remains incomplete. We introduce local contrastive editing that enables the localization and editing of a subset of weights in a target model in relation to a reference model. We deploy this approach to identify and modify subsets of weights that are associated with gender stereotypes in LMs. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that local contrastive editing can precisely localize and control a small subset (< 0.5%) of weights that encode gender bias. Our work (i) advances our understanding of how stereotypical biases can manifest in the parameter space of LMs and (ii) opens up new avenues for developing parameter-efficient strategies for controlling model properties in a contrastive manner.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Extracting Affect Aggregates from Longitudinal Social Media Data with Temporal Adapters for Large Language Models

This paper proposes temporally aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) as a tool for longitudinal analysis of social media data. We fine-tune Temporal Adapters for Llama 3 8B on full timelines from a panel of British Twitter users, and extract longitudinal aggregates of emotions and attitudes with established questionnaires. We focus our analysis on the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that had a strong impact on public opinion and collective emotions. We validate our estimates against representative British survey data and find strong positive, significant correlations for several collective emotions. The obtained estimates are robust across multiple training seeds and prompt formulations, and in line with collective emotions extracted using a traditional classification model trained on labeled data. We demonstrate the flexibility of our method on questions of public opinion for which no pre-trained classifier is available. Our work extends the analysis of affect in LLMs to a longitudinal setting through Temporal Adapters. It enables flexible, new approaches towards the longitudinal analysis of social media data.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

ReSi: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Representational Similarity Measures

Measuring the similarity of different representations of neural architectures is a fundamental task and an open research challenge for the machine learning community. This paper presents the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating representational similarity measures based on well-defined groundings of similarity. The representational similarity (ReSi) benchmark consists of (i) six carefully designed tests for similarity measures, (ii) 24 similarity measures, (iii) 14 neural network architectures, and (iv) seven datasets, spanning over the graph, language, and vision domains. The benchmark opens up several important avenues of research on representational similarity that enable novel explorations and applications of neural architectures. We demonstrate the utility of the ReSi benchmark by conducting experiments on various neural network architectures, real world datasets and similarity measures. All components of the benchmark are publicly available and thereby facilitate systematic reproduction and production of research results. The benchmark is extensible, future research can build on and further expand it. We believe that the ReSi benchmark can serve as a sound platform catalyzing future research that aims to systematically evaluate existing and explore novel ways of comparing representations of neural architectures.

cs.LG↗