Using LLMs to Model the Beliefs and Preferences of Targeted Populations

Understand

We consider the problem of aligning a large language model (LLM) to model the preferences of a human population.

• Modeling the beliefs, preferences, and behaviors of a specific population can be useful for a variety of different applications, such as conducting simulated focus groups for new products, conducting virtual surveys, and testing behavioral interventions, especially for interventions that are expensive, impractical, or unethical.
• Existing work has had mixed success using LLMs to accurately model human behavior in different contexts.
• We benchmark and evaluate two well-known fine-tuning approaches and evaluate the resulting populations on their ability to match the preferences of real human respondents on a survey of preferences for battery electric vehicles (BEVs).