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.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.752
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11348–11368
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.752/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Louis Castricato, Nathan Lile, Rafael Rafailov, Jan-Philipp Fränken, and Chelsea Finn. 2025. PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignment. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 11348–11368, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignment (Castricato et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.752.pdf