S2-MAS: A Society-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation Framework with 500 Million Household Persona Agents
Authors: Yang Li, Yike Wang, Di Wan, Chujun He, Zongsi Xu, Yitao Yu, Quanfeng Lu, Xiyu Chen, Sheng Zhong, Deng Binjie, Yichen Guo, Zhenwei Guo, Hou Jun, Kunhan Guo, Weihao Lin, Tuo Zhou, Hai Liu, Chenwei Wu, Jianyuan Zhong, Xilin Dai, Ye Luo
Organizations: The University of Hong Kong · Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong · HKU Business School Shenzhen Research Institutes, The University of Hong Kong · Nanyang Technological University · Risk Management Institute, National University of Singapore · School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong · School of Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi Science and Technology Normal University · University of Michigan, Ann Arbor · The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Simulating economic responses at society scale requires agents whose decisions reflect household circumstances. We introduce S2-MAS, a society-scale multi-agent simulation framework built on 500 million synthetic household personas grounded in real-survey data. Its Genese engine separates decisions from state updates, while reusable financial scenarios and application ledgers track consumption, cash, debt and payments. Trained with SFT + RLCD on 2.93 million examples, sharp-421m-mlx achieves 74.55% accuracy and 38.37% question-macro F1 on one-shot consumer financial-choice tasks derived from held-out survey responses. Its accuracy exceeds GLM-5.3-Flash, Jev 1.13, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, GPT-6-Luna and GPT-6-Astra in the common benchmark (full test for the first four; matched 500-group sample for Astra). We evaluate eight financial task families and simulate 12 million distinct household agents in paired purchase-funding conditions. Jointly raising purchase goals and approved credit limits increases consumption, with responses differing across age and income groups. Education, employment and household-size differences persist after age-income standardization and mainly reflect transitions from deferral to purchase. Asset and debt groups differ in cash drawdown, repayment and closing debt. S2-MAS links heterogeneous household decisions to evolving consumption, cash and repayment paths, supporting economic experiments across household groups and population scales.
Paired bilingual execution and 12M application (§6.2, Tables S32–S33)
T4: loan product and term
Choose a short/long contract or defer purchase
Payments, cash, arrears
paired sharp-421m/Laya execution (Appendix S11)
T5: liquid saving and risky assets
Allocate between liquid and risky holdings
Cash, assets, unfunded needs
paired sharp-421m/Laya execution (Appendix S11)
T6: multiple-debt payments
Allocate a payment budget across debts
Debt balances, arrears, default
paired sharp-421m/Laya execution (Appendix S11)
Table 2
Figure 3Figure 4Figure 5Figure 6Figure 7
Model / adaptation
Unique training QA
Selected cumulative exposures
Accuracy (%)
Question-macro F1 (%)
Original native Laya
0
0
60.1972
29.5995
sharp-4b-head-50k
50,000
100,000
67.3369
31.0166
sharp-4b-lora-50k
50,000
50,000
73.7289
36.6225
sharp-4b-head-200k
200,000
200,000
67.2841
30.8995
sharp-4b
200,000
200,000
74.1435
36.7343
sharp-9b
200,000
200,000
74.0919
36.6622
Table 8
Model / information condition
QA
Weighted accuracy (%)
Question-macro F1 (%)
Base Laya, full profile
20000
60.14
29.26
sharp-421m, full profile
20000
74.40
37.77
sharp-421m, no profile
20000
71.19
31.53
sharp-421m, wrong same-question profile
20000
69.56
34.17
Training-question majority
20000
71.71
32.09
Table 9
Model
Model size
Backend
QA / valid
Accuracy (%)
Question-macro F1 (%)
sharp-421m-mlx
421M
MLX CUDA FP16
240,458 / 240,458
74.5544
38.3746
Question-majority baseline
—
CPU; training labels
240,458 / 240,458
71.7710
32.1688
GLM-5.3-Flash
320B
API; provider precision
240,458 / 240,360
68.8756
37.9991
Jev 1.13
Not disclosed
API; provider precision
240,458 / 240,458
65.2584
37.4793
Kev 4B
4B
CUDA BF16
240,458 / 240,458
64.9120
36.0435
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash
552B + 196B
Provider API
240,458 / 240,400
63.7546
37.9400
Table 10
Tested component and contrast
Observed result
Contribution to the framework
Respondent information: full versus empty profile, same sharp-421m policy and questions; 20,000 QA
Full profiles add 6.2475 points of question-macro F1 (95% interval 5.4958–6.7267)
Agent attributes contribute predictive information beyond the question alone
Compact domain adaptation: original native Laya versus SFT on 200k unique QA; same 421M architecture, BF16
Accuracy rises from 60.1972% to 73.8753%
Survey supervision supplies most of the native policy’s downstream gain
Continuation objective: same SFT200 parent and added 200k-example pass budget; development-selected RLCD and CE checkpoints
RLCD raises accuracy from SFT’s 73.8753% to 73.9268%. Against CE continuation, RLCD’s F1 is 0.1229 points lower (95% interval -0.2073 to -0.0330)
The continuation objective changes the metric balance after SFT; CE has higher F1 in this comparison
Representation adaptation: sharp-4b-head-200k versus sharp-4b on the same 200k QA
Accuracy is 67.2841% with head-only training and 74.1435% with LoRA
Updating the representation adds value beyond the frozen-backbone route
Backbone substitution: sharp-4b and sharp-9b, same 200k-example one-pass LoRA protocol; different upstream histories
Accuracy is 74.1435% and 74.0919%; 9B minus 4B is -0.0516 points (-0.0981 to -0.0071)
These two adaptation routes reach similar accuracy on the common test
External policy substitution: full-data sharp-421m versus complete decision-model systems on common records and alternatives
sharp-421m exceeds Jev by 9.2960 accuracy points and 0.8953 F1 points. Clef has the highest F1: 38.5193%, versus sharp-421m’s 38.3746%; their paired F1 difference includes zero
A common interface exposes accuracy/F1 tradeoffs across decision systems with different readouts
Agent-based modeling simulates how interacting, heterogeneous entities and their environments produce patterns in social, economic, biological, and engineered systems.
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Fudan University, Shanghai, China · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA