cs.AISep 29, 2026

Demographic Pluralism: Inference-Time Modeling of Pluralistic Human Preference Distributions

Authors: Meng-Chen Wu, Qipin Chen, Ansh Jain, Tess Wood, Zhe Du, Si-Chi Chin

Organizations: Amazon Science

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in culturally sensitive settings, where alignment requires representing diverse preferences within populations. Yet existing methods model populations at coarse demographic or community levels and overlook within-group variation. We introduce Demographic Pluralism, an inference-time framework that estimates population-level opinion distributions without opinion-distribution training data or task-specific fine-tuning by generating multiple perspectives within demographically grounded groups. Across four backbones on GlobalOpinionQA and VITAL, it reduces Jensen-Shannon distance by 8.4%-26.4% over Modular Pluralism. Among weighted, equal-weighted, and inverse-weighted aggregation, equal weighting performs best overall; group-level error also increases with group weight, helping explain weighted aggregation's weaker performance.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables19 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. PLURAL: A Global Dataset for Value Alignment

    Jul 9, 2026Dhruv Agarwal, Anya Shukla, Tanya Goyal +1Preference DatasetsPluralistic Alignment

  2. Population Fidelity: Evaluating Population Representativeness in LLMs

    Sep 28, 2026Neemias B. da Silva, Martin Lukk, Ali Sutani +5Large Language Model BiasDemographics

  3. PALMs: Using Multi Construct-Grounded Rationales for Modeling Population Preferences in LLMs

    Aug 2, 2026Priyanka Dey, Brihi Joshi, Preyashi Poddar +2Large Language Model AlignmentSocial Reasoning