PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignment
Louis Castricato, Nathan Lile, Rafael Rafailov, Jan-Philipp Fränken, Chelsea Finn
Abstract
The rapid advancement of language models (LMs) necessitates robust alignment with diverse user values. However, current preference optimization approaches often fail to capture the plurality of user opinions, instead reinforcing majority viewpoints and marginalizing minority perspectives. We introduce PERSONA, a reproducible test bed designed to evaluate and improve pluralistic alignment of LMs. We procedurally generate diverse user profiles from US census data, resulting in 1,586 synthetic personas with varied demographic and idiosyncratic attributes. We then generate a large-scale evaluation dataset containing 3,868 prompts and 317,200 feedback pairs obtained from our synthetic personas. Leveraging this dataset, we systematically evaluate LM capabilities in role-playing diverse users, verified through human judges, and the establishment of both a benchmark, PERSONA Bench, for pluralistic alignment approaches as well as an extensive dataset to create new and future benchmarks.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{castricato-etal-2025-persona,
title = "{PERSONA}: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignment",
author = {Castricato, Louis and
Lile, Nathan and
Rafailov, Rafael and
Fr{\"a}nken, Jan-Philipp and
Finn, Chelsea},
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.752/",
pages = "11348--11368"
}