MetaPersona: Task-Grounded Synthetic Populations from Empirical Social Science

arXiv:2609.38392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personas used to seed LLM social simulations face a cold-start problem: existing methods lack a principled basis for deciding which attributes to include and how to assign their values. As a result, synthetic populations may misrepresent the demographic composition, latent attributes, and dependency structure that shape downstream behavior. We…