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arXiv 提交日期: 2026-05-13
📄 Abstract - When Do LLMs Generate Realistic Social Networks? A Multi-Dimensional Study of Culture, Language, Scale, and Method

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as substitutes for human subjects in behavioral simulations, including synthetic social network generation. Yet it remains unclear how their relational outputs depend on prompt design, cultural framing, prompt language, and model scale. Building on homophily theory and structural balance theory, we formalize four LLM-based tie-formation mechanisms: sequential, global, local, and iterative, and treat them as distinct conditional distributions over edge sets. Using a fixed roster of 50 demographically grounded personas, we generate 192 verified directed networks across four cultural contexts, four prompt languages, three GPT-4.1 variants, and four prompting architectures, with two seeds per condition. We find that cultural framing shifts inbreeding homophily and largest-component connectivity. Political affiliation dominates tie formation under three methods, while the global method substitutes age, showing that prompt architecture functions as a substantive sociological variable. Model scale produces a stable divergence ranking, with the smallest variant behaving qualitatively differently rather than merely noisily. Prompt language alone sharply shifts religion homophily, especially under Hindi prompting, while leaving political homophily nearly invariant. LLM-generated networks match real social graphs on clustering and modularity better than standard graph baselines, yet encode demographic biases above empirical levels. These results show that prompt choices often treated as implementation details encode substantive sociological assumptions.

顶级标签: llm social network generation model evaluation
详细标签: homophily structural balance cultural framing prompt engineering bias analysis 或 搜索:

大型语言模型何时能生成真实的社会网络?——基于文化、语言、规模与方法的跨维度研究 / When Do LLMs Generate Realistic Social Networks? A Multi-Dimensional Study of Culture, Language, Scale, and Method


1️⃣ 一句话总结

本研究系统测试了不同提示方式、语言、文化背景和模型大小对大型语言模型生成社会网络的影响,发现提示设计(尤其是全局方法和文化框架)会像社会学变量一样显著改变网络结构,而模型越小、语言越不同(如印地语),生成的网络与现实偏差越大。

源自 arXiv: 2605.12898