P2P preprint reports survey-response reconstruction at approximately $0.8 per survey

Researchers report that Prompts to Proxies, an inference-time system for reconstructing population survey responses, achieved average test mean squared error of 0.014 across 14 American Trends Panel waves at approximately 0.8 USD per survey. The preprint says it improved on prompting and demographic-conditioning baselines without model finetuning or individual demographic profiles. The system generates diverse proxy agents, then selects a compact weighted ensemble to match observed responses. In World Values Survey experiments, locale-specific generation helped on culturally divergent questions, limiting how broadly a shared proxy pool can transfer.