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

_Published Saturday, October 31, 2026 at 4:06 PM EDT · Science, AI · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

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.

## Sources

- [cs.AI updates on arXiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11311)

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Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/_rb6SlCs9fET-EmbOMFLqJ
Published: 2026-10-31T20:06:31.498Z
Story chronology: 2026-10-31T04:00:00.000Z
Retrieved: 2026-10-31T23:01:57.957Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)