Papers › Evaluating Large Language Model Biases in Persona-Steered Generation

Evaluating Large Language Model Biases in Persona-Steered Generation

30 May 2024arXiv:2405.20253archive 2025-07-28

Andy Liu, Mona Diab, Daniel Fried

The task of persona-steered text generation requires large language models (LLMs) to generate text that reflects the distribution of views that an individual fitting a persona could have. People have multifaceted personas, but prior work on bias in LLM-generated opinions has only explored multiple-choice settings or one-dimensional personas. We define an incongruous persona as a persona with multiple traits where one trait makes its other traits less likely in human survey data, e.g. political liberals who support increased military spending. We find that LLMs are 9.7% less steerable towards incongruous personas than congruous ones, sometimes generating the stereotypical stance associated with its demographic rather than the target stance. Models that we evaluate that are fine-tuned with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are more steerable, especially towards stances associated with political liberals and women, but present significantly less diverse views of personas. We also find variance in LLM steerability that cannot be predicted from multiple-choice opinion evaluation. Our results show the importance of evaluating models in open-ended text generation, as it can surface new LLM opinion biases. Moreover, such a setup can shed light on our ability to steer models toward a richer and more diverse range of viewpoints.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

10 samples harvested; 8 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 2 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 10 of the 10 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from andyjliu/persona-steered-generation-bias. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections