@inproceedings{meister-etal-2025-benchmarking,
    title = "Benchmarking Distributional Alignment of Large Language Models",
    author = "Meister, Nicole  and
      Guestrin, Carlos  and
      Hashimoto, Tatsunori",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.2/",
    pages = "24--49",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
    abstract = "Language models (LMs) are increasingly used as simulacra for people, yet their ability to match the distribution of views of a specific demographic group and be \textit{distributionally aligned} remains uncertain. This notion of distributional alignment is complex, as there is significant variation in the types of attributes that are simulated. Prior works have underexplored the role of three critical variables{---}the question domain, steering method, and distribution expression method{---}which motivates our contribution of a benchmark explicitly addressing these dimensions. We construct a dataset expanding beyond political values, create human baselines for this task, and evaluate the extent to which an LM can align with a particular group{'}s opinion distribution to inform design choices of such simulation systems. Our analysis reveals open problems regarding if, and how, LMs can be used to simulate humans, and that LLMs can more accurately describe the opinion distribution than simulate such distributions."
}