Research

Paper

AI LLM March 19, 2026

RADIUS: Ranking, Distribution, and Significance - A Comprehensive Alignment Suite for Survey Simulation

Authors

Weronika Łajewska, Paul Missault, George Davidson, Saab Mansour

Abstract

Simulation of surveys using LLMs is emerging as a powerful application for generating human-like responses at scale. Prior work evaluates survey simulation using metrics borrowed from other domains, which are often ad hoc, fragmented, and non-standardized, leading to results that are difficult to compare. Moreover, existing metrics focus mainly on accuracy or distributional measures, overlooking the critical dimension of ranking alignment. In practice, a simulation can achieve high accuracy while still failing to capture the option most preferred by humans - a distinction that is critical in decision-making applications. We introduce RADIUS, a comprehensive two-dimensional alignment suite for survey simulation that captures: 1) RAnking alignment and 2) DIstribUtion alignment, each complemented by statistical Significance testing. RADIUS highlights the limitations of existing metrics, enables more meaningful evaluation of survey simulation, and provides an open-source implementation for reproducible and comparable assessment.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2603.19002
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: cs.CL
Published: 2026-03-19
Fetched: 2026-03-20 06:02

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Raw Data (Debug)
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