ConsumerSimBench evaluates 13 LLMs on reconstructing crowd reactions from 1,553 Chinese social-media topics using 23,122 auditable yes-no criteria, finding maximum coverage of 47.8% by Gemini-3.1-Pro.
SimBench: Benchmarking the Ability of Large Language Models to Simulate Human Behaviors
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abstract
Large language model (LLM) simulations of human behavior have the potential to revolutionize the social and behavioral sciences, if and only if they faithfully reflect real human behaviors. Current evaluations of simulation fidelity are fragmented, based on bespoke tasks and metrics, creating a patchwork of incomparable results. To address this, we introduce SimBench, the first large-scale, standardized benchmark for a robust, reproducible science of LLM simulation. By unifying 20 diverse datasets covering tasks from moral decision-making to economic choice across a large global participant pool, SimBench provides the necessary foundation to ask fundamental questions about when, how, and why LLM simulations succeed or fail. We show that the best LLMs today achieve meaningful but modest simulation fidelity (score: 40.80/100), with performance scaling log-linearly with model size but not with increased inference-time compute. We discover an alignment-simulation tradeoff: instruction tuning improves performance on low-entropy (consensus) questions but degrades it on high-entropy (diverse) ones. Models particularly struggle when simulating specific demographic groups. Finally, we demonstrate that simulation ability correlates most strongly with knowledge-intensive reasoning (MMLU-Pro, r = 0.939). By making progress measurable, we aim to accelerate the development of more faithful LLM simulators.
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unclear 1representative citing papers
Introduces OmniBehavior benchmark from real-world data and shows LLMs exhibit hyper-activity, persona homogenization, and utopian bias in behavior simulation.
PrivacySIM shows that conditioning LLMs on user personas like demographics and attitudes improves simulation of privacy choices but reaches only 40.4% accuracy against real responses from 1,000 users.
LLM student personas with ADHD show stable self-reported traits at high intensity but behavioral drift in unscripted interactions that scripted prompts eliminate.
The base LLM choice dominates simulation outcomes in LLM-based social networks, while other design parameters show either additive or complex interactive effects.
citing papers explorer
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Can LLMs Think Like Consumers? Benchmarking Crowd-Level Reaction Reconstruction with ConsumerSimBench
ConsumerSimBench evaluates 13 LLMs on reconstructing crowd reactions from 1,553 Chinese social-media topics using 23,122 auditable yes-no criteria, finding maximum coverage of 47.8% by Gemini-3.1-Pro.
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Towards Real-world Human Behavior Simulation: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Long-horizon, Cross-scenario, Heterogeneous Behavior Traces
Introduces OmniBehavior benchmark from real-world data and shows LLMs exhibit hyper-activity, persona homogenization, and utopian bias in behavior simulation.
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PrivacySIM: Evaluating LLM Simulation of User Privacy Behavior
PrivacySIM shows that conditioning LLMs on user personas like demographics and attitudes improves simulation of privacy choices but reaches only 40.4% accuracy against real responses from 1,000 users.
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LLM-Based Educational Simulation: Evaluating Temporal Student Persona Stability Across ADHD Profiles
LLM student personas with ADHD show stable self-reported traits at high intensity but behavioral drift in unscripted interactions that scripted prompts eliminate.
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The $\textit{Silicon Society}$ Cookbook: Design Space of LLM-based Social Simulations
The base LLM choice dominates simulation outcomes in LLM-based social networks, while other design parameters show either additive or complex interactive effects.