Song-Ze Yu

Author directory

2026

We present _Anamnesis_, an interactive system for demographically controllable survey simulation using large language models. Open-source and designed for _non-technical_ users and researchers, Anamnesis enables the prototyping and stress-testing of survey instruments on virtual populations. 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.