Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstories

We introduce Anthology, a way for conditioning LLMs to consultant, constant, and various digital personas by producing and using naturalistic backstories with wealthy particulars of particular person values and expertise.

What does it imply for giant language fashions (LLMs) to be skilled on huge textual content corpora, collectively produced by hundreds of thousands and billions of distinctive human authors?

In “Language Models as Agent Models”, compelling proof means that latest language fashions might be thought-about fashions of brokers: supplied with a textual context, LLMs are able to producing conditional textual content that represents the traits of an agent prone to have produced that context. This implies that, with applicable conditioning, LLMs might be guided to approximate the responses of a specific human voice, reasonably than the combination of voices that in any other case emerges. If realized, this functionality of LLMs would have vital implications for person analysis and social sciences—conditioned language fashions as digital personas of human topics may function cost-effective pilot research and supporting greatest practices in human research, e.g. the Belmont ideas of justice and beneficence.

On this work, we introduce Anthology, an method for steering LLMs to consultant, constant, and various digital personas by offering richly detailed life narratives of people as conditioning context to fashions.

In doing so, we additionally current strategies to generate backstories from LLMs themselves as a method to effectively produce huge units overlaying a variety of human demographics.
By grounding language fashions in naturalistic backstories, Anthology permits LLMs to simulate particular person human samples with elevated constancy, measured by way of matching the distributions and consistencies of human responses.

Our Strategy: Anthology

Conditioning Language Mannequin Era with Particular person Life Narratives

A major limitation of earlier strategies in steering LLMs to digital personas has been the lack to reliably approximate particular person human samples. Prior approaches immediate LLMs with broad demographic data, e.g., “I’m a 25-year-old from California. My highest stage of training is lower than highschool,” that are basically our bodies of textual content generated from a tuple of demographic variables.
With these strategies, we’re solely capable of approximate human samples at a inhabitants stage, not on the particular person stage, which leads to:

Responses vulnerable to LLMs defaulting to stereotypical and/or prototypical portrayals, as they’re solely conditioned on demographic variables (e.g., race and gender)
Incapability to offer vital metrics of curiosity corresponding to covariance and statistical significance, as particular person responses are required for such compuatations

Anthology permits the approximation of particular person topics by conditioning with richly detailed backstories. Via these backstories, the mannequin captures implicit and specific markers of private identification, together with demographic traits and spontaneous references to cultural, socioeconomic backgrounds, and life philosophies. Our method entails producing an enormous set of backstories representing a variety of demographic attributes through language fashions queried with unrestricted, open-ended prompts corresponding to, “Inform me about your self.” We then match digital personas conditioned by every backstory to real-world survey samples.

Outcomes: Nearer Approximation of Public Opinion Polls

For analysis, we evaluate the effectiveness of various strategies for conditioning digital personas within the context of approximating three Pew Analysis Middle ATP surveys: Waves 34, 92, and 99.

Outcomes on approximating human responses for Pew Analysis Middle ATP surveys. Boldface and underlined outcomes point out values closest and the second closest to these of people, respectively.

As measures of success in approximating human samples with digital personas, we take into account the next metrics:

Common Wasserstein distance (WD) between response distributions as a measure of representativeness
Frobenius norm (Fro.) between correlation matrices as a measure of consistency
Cronbach’s alpha as a further measure of inside consistency

Previous to analyzing digital topics, we estimate the decrease bounds of every analysis metric by repeatedly dividing the human inhabitants into two equal-sized teams at random and calculating these metrics between the subgroups.
We take averaged values from 100 iterations to symbolize the lower-bound estimates.

We constantly observe that Anthology outperforms different conditioning strategies with respect to all metrics, for each the Llama-3-70B and the Mixtral-8x22B.
When evaluating two matching strategies, the grasping matching methodology tends to point out higher efficiency on the typical Wasserstein distance throughout all Waves. We attribute variations in matching strategies to the one-to-one correspondence situation of most weight matching and the restricted variety of digital customers obtainable. Particularly, the weights assigned to matched digital topics in most weight matching are inevitably decrease than these in grasping matching, because the latter relaxes the constraints on one-to-one correspondence. This discrepancy can lead to a decrease demographic similarity between matched human and digital customers in comparison with the counterpart from grasping matching. These outcomes counsel that the richness of the generated backstories in our method elicits extra nuanced responses in comparison with baselines.

Last Ideas

Anthology marks a promising new path in conditioning digital personas in LLMs that might doubtlessly reshape how we conduct person analysis, public opinion surveys, and different social science purposes by providing a scalable, and at occasions, moral various to conventional human surveys.
Nonetheless, using Anthology, as in every other utility of language fashions within the social sciences, additionally brings a number of concerns to the forefront: though the generated backstories assist create extra consultant personas, there stays a danger of perpetuating biases or infringing on privateness, so outcomes ought to be used and interpreted with warning.

By way of future steps, we envision our method benefiting from a extra expansive and various set of backstories, every representing a constant life narrative of people.
Moreover, a priceless extension of the work could be to think about free-form response technology, enabling extra pure and nuanced persona simulations past structured survey codecs corresponding to multiple-choice.
Lastly, an thrilling subsequent dimension in making use of LLMs in behavioral research would contain simulating longer-term results, permitting digital personas to mannequin and retrospectively look at adjustments over time.

All of those instructions current multitudes of technical challenges; please tell us in case you are fascinated about collaborating or wish to focus on our work additional!

Be taught extra about our work: link to full paper

@article{moon2024virtual,
  title={Digital personas for language fashions through an anthology of backstories},
  writer={Moon, Suhong and Abdulhai, Marwa and Kang, Minwoo and Suh, Joseph and Soedarmadji, Widyadewi and Behar, Eran Kohen and Chan, David M},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.06576},
  yr={2024}
}