PERSONA: A Reproducible Testbed for Pluralistic Alignment
Authors: name: Louis Castricato, name: Nathan Lile, name: Rafael Rafailov, name: Jan-Philipp Fränken, name: Chelsea Finn

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.
The full dataset and benchmarks are available here:
https://www.synthlabs.ai/research/persona.