Beyond the Mean: Three-Axis Fidelity for Aligning LLM-Based Survey Simulators from Small Pilot Data

arXiv:2606.28963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate social survey responses, yet their outputs exhibit systematic biases: marginal distributions are skewed, response variance is poorly calibrated, and predictor-outcome relationships are attenuated. We ask a simple question: given a small pilot sample of human responses, can an LLM recover the statistical characteristics of a broader population? We decompose recovery along three axes: str...