arxivphysics.soc-phcs.AI2026-07-17
Distribution-First Population Simulation: Collapse, Calibration, and Recall in Non-WEIRD LLM Persona Modeling
Synthetic-population tools increasingly run every individual as an independent large language model (LLM) agent. Using real survey microdata, we show that this paradigm has a basic failure mode, and we set a distribution-first corrective against it, all measured with a determinis…