BehaviorBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Behavioral Science Tasks
Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2606.24162 (cs)
[Submitted on 23 Jun 2026]
Title:BehaviorBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Behavioral Science Tasks
Authors:Jin Huang, Yutong Xie, Wanli Song, Xingjian Zhang, Walter Yuan, Matthew O. Jackson, Qiaozhu Mei
View a PDF of the paper titled BehaviorBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Behavioral Science Tasks, by Jin Huang and 6 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics. While these models show promise in individual tasks such as survey response prediction and human-subject experiment simulation, there remains no systematic understanding of how well they perform across diverse behavioral science tasks, contexts, and populations. We introduce BehaviorBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates foundation models along four core capabilities: (1) behavior prediction and simulation, (2) strategic decision-making, (3) subject-trait inference, and (4) behavioral knowledge application. Crucially, BehaviorBench evaluates model outputs at both the individual and distributional levels, capturing not only per-subject accuracy but also population-level alignment, an essential requirement for behavioral validity. Leveraging the tasks in BehaviorBench, we further develop this http URL-1.5, extending the this http URL family of behavioral foundation models fine-tuned on behavioral data. Our results reveal a considerable gap: proprietary general-purpose models excel at individual-level prediction and knowledge-intensive tasks, whereas behavioral foundation models, fine-tuned on behavioral data, achieve substantially stronger distributional alignment. Notably, this http URL-1.5 leads on distributional metrics and remains competitive on individual-level metrics, suggesting that proper behavioral adaptation can close the gap. Our results highlight the importance of distributional evaluation, establish BehaviorBench as a foundation for developing and assessing behaviorally aligned AI systems, and demonstrate this http URL-1.5's potential for a broad range of behavioral science studies. Our BehaviorBench and this http URL-1.5 models can be accessed via this https URL.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.24162 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2606.24162v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.24162
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
View a PDF of the paper titled BehaviorBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Behavioral Science Tasks, by Jin Huang and 6 other authors
References & Citations
Loading...
Bookmark
Bibliographic Tools
Code, Data, Media
Demos
Related Papers
About arXivLabs
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — Machine Learning
-
Representation as a Bottleneck for Mechanistic Interpretability: The Manifestation Unit Protocol
Jul 2
-
SNAP-FM: Sparse Nonlinear Accelerated Projection for Physics-Constrained Generative Modeling
Jul 2
-
SemiScope: Disentangling Classifier Tuning and Joint Optimization in Semi-Supervised Security Classification
Jul 2
-
A Filtered Mixture-of-Generators for Fully Synthetic Survival Training
Jul 2
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.