NEWS

---

LLMRpanel 0.6.1 (2026-09-12)

Corrections replacing 0.6.0, which was never published.

• item_order randomization is gone, and panel_instrument() refuses it with an explanation: every persona-item pair is an independent request, so no respondent ever sees a questionnaire order, and shuffling a recorded position number claimed an exposure that was never administered. item_position now documents the item's fixed instrument position.
• Option-order randomization respects scale structure. Choice options are permuted. A Likert scale has two readable presentations, so it is shown reversed for a random half of responses.
• The submitted grid is the experimental record. A runner contributes responses and provider diagnostics; the assignments it returns are ignored in favor of the ones submitted. Retained provenance grows to request hashes (the default runner now asks LLMR for them), model versions, and durations.
• panel_benchmark() now rejects a human reference whose probabilities fall outside [0, 1], whose shares miss one, or whose labels were never offered. Conjoint responses are refused, since profiles differ by respondent. An item whose every response failed to parse gets NA shares; zero shares would claim the categories were available and unchosen.
• panel_bias_audit() reports NA with a note when chi-square expected counts are sparse, instead of an unreliable p-value.
• An administration whose replies come back empty with finish_reason "length" now warns and names max_tokens as the cause. Reasoning models can spend a small budget entirely on hidden reasoning and emit no visible text.
• panel_from_personas() requires data; the ANES example must be named. A weight that is NA or negative now stops the call, where it used to be quietly set to zero, and weight columns must be numeric. Weights supplied without n draw a warning, since only a sample uses them.
• panel_power() is removed. Its arithmetic treated model-persona dispersion as if it were human outcome variance, which is not a sound basis for planning a human study; a design-sensitivity function with an explicit dispersion source may return later.
• Placeholder filling is single-pass, so a substituted value containing braces is left alone.
• The panel print shows a truncated persona preview.
• The Studio's persona-field default is the demographic fields. Sending all 125 columns put prior attitude items into the prompt, where they leak into the answers; the vignette now executes offline end to end through a deterministic runner, with one live-gated chunk; cross-model comparisons in it reuse the seed so both models face the same assignments.

LLMRpanel 0.6.0

Initial CRAN release.

• panel_from_margins(), panel_from_data(), and panel_from_personas() create panels from supplied margins, microdata rows, or persona data frames. as_persona_frame() attaches question and field metadata to a data frame. Reports identify which panel source was used.
• panel_administer() administers every item to every persona. It can randomize item and option order and records item_position and option_order. Its classed result stores response rows in $data and the panel, instrument, benchmark, and token usage in separate fields. Response rows retain response_text, response_id, success, model, and provider as columns.
• panel_batch_submit() submits an administration to a provider's asynchronous batch API. panel_batch_status() and panel_batch_fetch() inspect and retrieve the job. Synchronous and batch submission share the max_calls and confirm gate.
• panel_benchmark() compares response shares with supplied human benchmarks and records benchmark coverage. plot() displays the compared shares.
• panel_bias_audit() reports parse failures and first-option sensitivity.
• conjoint_instrument() creates conjoint choice tasks with profiles randomized independently for each respondent. conjoint_design() returns a classed list with profile and attribute fields, and conjoint_amce() estimates from the recorded respondent-level profiles with standard errors clustered by respondent in a classed result that retains run counts as columns.
• run_panel_studio() provides the panel workflow in an optional Shiny application and can download responses, reports, and benchmark tables. The studio now preserves readable long-form output, presents response shares and diagnostics before technical details, carries administered responses into benchmarking and analysis, supports repeated administrations and conjoint instruments, exposes power and AMCE calculations, permits full ANES persona inspection and field selection, honors shared generation settings, and shows recorded call timing when it is available. Numbered configuration sections can be collapsed while the administration action and run plan remain in view. Persona templates and item wording have editable working defaults. Panel construction, administration, benchmark comparison, power, and AMCE actions are disabled when their known inputs are incomplete, with the unmet requirement shown beside the control. ANES construction separates sampled panels from panels made from selected respondents. Sampled panels disclose replacement sampling above the 100-respondent source size and no longer impose a 500-person GUI ceiling; selected panels require at least one respondent and ignore panel size. A blank shared maximum-output-token field now uses and displays a 512-token package default, while an explicit sidebar value takes precedence. Response text and response labels receive most of the width in display tables, internal identifiers remain available through a column control, and shares, benchmark deviations, and other double columns use concise display-only rounding.