🤖 AI Summary
Traditional surveys are costly, time-consuming, and challenging to control for demographic variables, while existing simulation methods often produce inauthentic responses due to insufficient modeling of structured individual backgrounds. To address these limitations, this work proposes a large-scale virtual survey simulation platform designed for non-technical users, which uniquely integrates the Anthology and Alterity frameworks. By leveraging structured narrative contexts to guide large language models, the platform generates demographically consistent responses and supports open-ended generation, probabilistic resampling, and multimodal inputs—including text, images, and audio. Evaluated on tasks ranging from political typology and biomedical topics to preference elicitation for New Yorker cartoon captions, the platform yields opinion distributions that significantly outperform baseline methods and closely align with real-world data, demonstrating its validity and practical utility.
📝 Abstract
We present Anamnesis, an interactive system for demographically controllable survey simulation using large language models. Open-source, and designed for non-technical users/researchers, Anamnesis enables the prototyping and stress-testing of survey instruments on virtual populations rather than real human subjects. The platform operationalizes the recently introduced Anthology and Alterity frameworks, which use structured narrative backstories to condition model responses, within a unified web interface. It supports open-ended generation, probabilistic demographic resampling, and multimodal (image and audio) surveys. We evaluate the system through two case studies: (1) replicating segments of Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel (ATP) on political typology and biomedical issues and (2) emulating human preference in the New Yorker Caption Contest. In both cases, Anamnesis produces opinion distributions that more closely match real-world survey data than standard persona-prompting baselines, offering a transparent, reproducible, and open-source alternative to proprietary simulation services.