Attributes as Textual Genes: Leveraging LLMs as Genetic Algorithm Simulators for Conditional Synthetic Data Generation

Guangzeng Han, Weisi Liu, Xiaolei Huang


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating synthetic data, but ensuring its quality and diversity remains challenging. We propose Genetic Prompt, a novel framework that combines genetic algorithms with LLMs to augment synthetic data generation. Our approach treats semantic text attributes as gene sequences and leverages the LLM to simulate crossover and mutation operations. This genetic process enhances data quality and diversity by creating novel attribute combinations, yielding synthetic distributions closer to real-world data. To optimize parent selection, we also integrate an active learning scheme that expands the offspring search space. Our experiments on multiple NLP tasks reveal several key findings: Genetic Prompt not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines but also shows robust performance across various generator model sizes and scales. Moreover, we demonstrate that fusing our synthetic data with the original training set significantly boosts downstream model performance, particularly for class-imbalanced scenarios. Our findings validate that Genetic Prompt is an effective method for producing high-quality synthetic data for a wide range of NLP applications.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.1055
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19367–19389
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1055/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guangzeng Han, Weisi Liu, and Xiaolei Huang. 2025. Attributes as Textual Genes: Leveraging LLMs as Genetic Algorithm Simulators for Conditional Synthetic Data Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 19367–19389, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Attributes as Textual Genes: Leveraging LLMs as Genetic Algorithm Simulators for Conditional Synthetic Data Generation (Han et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1055.pdf
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