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The Paradox of Prompting: Less Detail Makes AI More Human (arxiv.org)
3 points by virtual_rf on May 26, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A testbed creates 1,586 fake people from US census data and collects their feedback on many prompts, to test if models speak for everyone. Today's usual training on pooled preferences echoes majority views and pushes minority ones aside, which this testbed can now measure.

Abstract · PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignment

The rapid advancement of language models (LMs) necessitates robust alignment with diverse user values. However, current preference optimization approaches often fail to capture the plurality of user opinions, instead reinforcing majority viewpoints and marginalizing minority perspectives. We introduce PERSONA, a reproducible test bed designed to evaluate and improve pluralistic alignment of LMs. We procedurally generate diverse user profiles from US census data, resulting in 1,586 synthetic personas with varied demographic and idiosyncratic attributes. We then generate a large-scale evaluation dataset containing 3,868 prompts and 317,200 feedback pairs obtained from our synthetic personas. Leveraging this dataset, we systematically evaluate LM capabilities in role-playing diverse users, verified through human judges, and the establishment of both a benchmark, PERSONA Bench, for pluralistic alignment approaches as well as an extensive dataset to create new and future benchmarks. The full dataset and benchmarks are available here: https://www.synthlabs.ai/research/persona.

Louis Castricato, Nathan Lile, Rafael Rafailov, Jan-Philipp Fränken, Chelsea Finn
arXiv:2407.17387 · cs.CL · submitted Jul 24, 2024
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