RADIUS: Ranking, Distribution, and Significance - A Comprehensive Alignment Suite for Survey Simulation

Abstract

Simulation of surveys using LLMs is emerging as a powerful application for generating human-like responses at scale. Prior work evaluates survey simulation using metrics borrowed from other domains, which are often ad hoc, fragmented, and non-standardized, leading to results that are difficult to compare. Moreover, existing metrics focus mainly on accuracy or distributional measures, overlooking the critical dimension of ranking alignment. In practice, a simulation can achieve high accuracy while still failing to capture the option most preferred by humans - a distinction that is critical in decision-making applications. We introduce RADIUS, a comprehensive two-dimensional alignment suite for survey simulation that captures: 1) RAnking alignment and 2) DIstribUtion alignment, each complemented by statistical Significance testing. RADIUS highlights the limitations of existing metrics, enables more meaningful evaluation of survey simulation, and provides an open-source implementation for reproducible and comparable assessment.