Item-Mean Surrogates: Why Richer Persona Data Fail to Improve LLMs as Human Surrogates

arXiv:2608.29455 · cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-29 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-29

Updated: 2026-08-29

Comments: 37 pages, 6 figures, 14 tables. Includes Supporting Information (main text pages 1-9; SI Appendix pages 1-28)

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes

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