Anticipating Social Consequences with Distributional World Models
Organizations: Department of Data Science & AI, Monash University, Australia · Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia
Abstract
Social world models predict how interactions develop after an action, helping agents negotiate, cooperate and mediate. In these situations, one action can lead to several plausible futures, hence predicting only one future can overlook consequential alternatives, while exploring them through repeated simulations increases inference cost. We propose DSWM, a Distributional Social World Model that predicts alternative responses, their probabilities and immediate and final outcome values in one output per candidate action. We train a 4B model on repeated simulations using supervised fine-tuning and GRPO. At inference time, the actor uses these possible consequences to choose an action. Across three seen and two unseen environments, with interaction backbones absent from training collection, DSWM achieves the best average performance on 13 of 15 metrics. Ablations show that retaining multiple futures and their predicted probabilities improves outcomes in all five environments.
Figures & tables
| Magentic-NL | SOTOPIA | AgentSense | |||||
| Method | Cust. util. | Serv. rev. | Needs met | Goal | Overall | Goal | Info. acc. |
| Actor alone | 179.98 8.30 | 116.84 7.34 | 0.35 0.021 | 6.47 0.24 | 2.45 0.15 | 0.66 0.027 | 0.86 0.025 |
| Candidates only | 195.46 11.44 | 125.20 8.51 | 0.37 0.023 | 6.77 0.19 | 2.48 0.11 | 0.66 0.024 | 0.88 0.027 |
| Single future | 206.05 8.20 | 125.15 8.29 | 0.37 0.028 | 6.49 0.23 | 2.63 0.13 | 0.67 0.019 | 0.91 0.026 |
| Direct expectation | 208.68 12.20 | 129.33 6.05 | 0.36 0.030 | 7.59 0.23 | 2.49 0.14 | 0.70 0.022 | 0.88 0.029 |
| Sampled futures | 255.56 9.65 | 150.01 6.65 | 0.38 0.024 | 7.10 0.23 | 2.92 0.15 | 0.59 0.021 | 0.80 0.024 |
| ProMediate | SOTOPIA-ToM | |||||||
| Method | Cons. chg. | Topic eff. | Med. intel. | InfoMgmt | DA | IA | CPV | EFF |
| Actor alone | 0.0576 0.0058 | 0.0030 0.0004 | 3.2179 0.200 | 0.1769 0.0174 | 0.3538 0.0205 | 0.1125 0.0138 | 0.3487 0.0218 | 0.6961 0.0294 |
| Candidates only | 0.0616 0.0053 | 0.0031 0.0004 | 3.3219 0.153 | 0.1789 0.0126 | 0.3764 0.0227 | 0.1151 0.0153 | 0.3689 0.0179 | 0.7525 0.0328 |
| Single future | 0.0452 0.0039 | 0.0028 0.0003 | 3.2051 0.137 | 0.1795 0.0115 | 0.3692 0.0244 | 0.1278 0.0127 | 0.3475 0.0282 | 0.8154 0.0313 |
| Direct expectation | 0.0440 0.0050 | 0.0034 0.0003 | 3.2919 0.136 | 0.1840 0.0133 | 0.4736 0.0274 | 0.1352 0.0147 | 0.3376 0.0177 | 0.8813 0.0391 |
| Sampled futures | 0.0569 0.0054 | 0.0027 0.0003 | 3.2914 0.189 | 0.2160 0.0146 | 0.4650 0.0192 | 0.1249 0.0145 | 0.3071 0.0209 | 0.8509 0.0382 |
| Magentic-NL | SOTOPIA | AgentSense | ProMediate | SOTOPIA-ToM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Selection variant | Cust. util. | Goal | Goal | Cons. chg. | InfoMgmt |
| Full DSWM | 272.82 7.91 | 8.21 0.20 | 0.72 0.023 | 0.0628 0.0047 | 0.2508 0.0119 |
| Without response text | 272.82 7.91 | 8.02 0.25 | 0.63 0.025 | 0.0574 0.0044 | 0.2348 0.0112 |
| Expected values only | 272.82 7.91 | 7.98 0.19 | 0.60 0.025 | 0.0511 0.0038 | 0.2306 0.0140 |
| Uniform response probabilities | 254.60 8.35 | 8.16 0.20 | 0.68 0.028 | 0.0552 0.0058 | 0.2295 0.0148 |
| Most likely response only | 243.85 10.00 | 7.87 0.17 | 0.67 0.025 | 0.0526 0.0044 | 0.2187 0.0112 |
| Predictor | Magentic | SOTOPIA | AgentSense |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single future | 0.201 0.010 | 0.178 0.008 | 0.164 0.013 |
| Direct expectation | 0.171 0.009 | 0.134 0.010 | 0.158 0.014 |
| Sampled futures | 0.145 0.009 | 0.151 0.008 | 0.169 0.011 |
| DSWM (SFT) | 0.139 0.010 | 0.133 0.008 | 0.142 0.012 |
| Full DSWM | 0.127 0.007 | 0.116 0.011 | 0.135 0.011 |
Appendix figures & tables16 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Data | Mag.-NL | SOTOPIA | AgentS. | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original | 4,975 | 4,766 | 1,118 | 10,859 |
| Recovered | 1,023 | 0 | 186 | 1,209 |
| New | 43 | 44 | 92 | 179 |
| Full pool | 6,041 | 4,810 | 1,396 | 12,247 |
| Environment | Test queries | Final queries | Visible contexts | Context–action pairs | Held-out-spec. queries |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magentic-NL | 1,316 | 485 | 206 | 936 | 936 |
| SOTOPIA | 1,036 | 335 | 133 | 511 | 518 |
| AgentSense | 379 | 106 | 95 | 379 | 379 |
| Total | 2,731 | 926 | 434 | 1,826 | 1,833 |
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| LoRA | rank 64, 128, dropout 0.05; attention and MLP projections |
| SFT schedule | 2 balanced epochs; final checkpoint |
| SFT learning rate | ; cosine, 3% warmup |
| SFT batch / length | 1 accumulation 16; 8,192 tokens |
| GRPO schedule | 1 pass over the eligible weighted pool |
| GRPO learning rate | ; constant after 10 warmup steps |
| Benchmark | Use | Runner and deviations | Main metrics (native scale) | Test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magentic-NL | train | New two-party customer/service negotiation built from Magentic Marketplace data ( Microsoft, 2025 ) (restaurant and home-contractor scenario families). It is not the official marketplace benchmark. Each turn is free text plus an optional act (offer, counter, accept, decline); at most 12 messages; scenario-defined price cap; deterministic negotiation style per scenario. | customer utility, service revenue, needs met (deterministic) | 90 |
| SOTOPIA | train | 450 benchmark combinations and prompts ( Zhou et al., 2024 ) ; at most 20 turns or until an agent leaves. The local judge uses the SOTOPIA-EVAL rubrics in an object schema. | seven SOTOPIA-EVAL dimensions, including goal (0–10) | 70 |
| AgentSense | train | Official template ( Mou et al., 2025 ) ; random next speaker with no repeats; 15 messages; first paragraph only, 128 tokens. Official goal questions, but a single judge instead of the official three-model ensemble. | goal completion (0–1); information questions where available | 270 |
| ProMediate | unseen | Official cases, personas, conflict-mode, mediator and judge prompts and metric formulas ( Liu et al., 2026 ) . Compact motivation-ranked turn-taking replaces the released engine; at most 40 utterances (official: parties topics); known released-code bugs avoided; initial judgments precomputed. | consensus change; topic-level efficiency; mediator intelligence | 18 |
| SOTOPIA-ToM | unseen | We reconstruct the runner and judge from the released gold set and the paper ( YS et al., 2026 ) : round-robin turns, public and direct-message channels, at most 60 turns, early stop. The DA/IA/CPV/EFF judge prompts are our reimplementation; the formulas follow the paper; metrics are computed for the focal agent. | InfoMgmt; DA, IA, CPV, EFF | 160 |
| Environment | Total | Train | Val. | Test | Test role configs. | Episodes / method |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magentic-NL | 439 | 306 | 43 | 90 | 180 | 2,700 |
| SOTOPIA | 450 | 325 | 55 | 70 | 140 | 2,100 |
| AgentSense | 1,225 | 865 | 90 | 270 | 650 | 9,750 |
| ProMediate | 18 | 0 | 0 | 18 | 18 | 270 |
| SOTOPIA-ToM | 160 | 0 | 0 | 160 | 536 | 8,040 |
| Method | Information at decision time | WM training |
|---|---|---|
| Actor alone | Ordinary action prompt, without candidate selection | none |
| Candidates only | Up to four actor proposals; selection without predictions | none |
| Single future | One predicted response segment and its outcome values | matched SFT |
| Direct expectation | Expected value of each requested outcome measure and horizon; no response text | matched SFT |
| Sampled futures | 30 independent response segments with outcome values per candidate | matched SFT |
| S3AP F&A | A prompted next-state prediction and the Foresee-and-Act procedure ( Zhou et al., 2025 ) | none |
| Method | Component | Setting |
| S3AP F&A | Planning | One provisional action, one next-state prediction, one refinement |
| Prediction / refinement | Temperature 0.7 / 0.7; structured output | |
| Models | Internal world model matches the evaluation backbone of the focal actor | |
| GDP-Zero | Search | 20 simulations; 3 realizations per state; ; |
| Simulated utterances | Actor temperature 0.7; partner temperature 1.1; 128-token limit; 5-turn history window | |
| Action prior | 15 samples at temperature 1.0; additive smoothing 1.0 |
| Prediction | Order | InfoMgmt | CPV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct expectation | Average first | 0.1846 | 0.3382 |
| Sampled futures (30) | Average first | 0.2114 | 0.3097 |
| Sampled futures (30) | Combine first | 0.2238 | 0.3121 |
| DSWM | Average first | 0.2371 | 0.2674 |
| DSWM | Combine first | 0.2462 | 0.2586 |
| Environment | Seeds | Pairs | [95% CI] | Failure (%) | Judge | Human | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DSWM | Samples | ||||||
| Magentic-NL | 3 | 300 | 0.0 | 0.0 | n/a | n/a | |
| SOTOPIA | 3 | 300 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.76 | 100 | |
| AgentSense | 3 | 300 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.71 | 100 | |
| ProMediate | 3 | 300 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.68 | 100 | |
| SOTOPIA-ToM | 3 | 300 | 0.0 | 0.0 | 0.73 | 100 | |
| Predictor | RMSE | Rank | Raw valid (%) | Tokens / cand. | Latency (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single future | 0.178 0.008 | 0.49 0.024 | 98.8 0.6 | 438 12 | 610 46 |
| Direct expectation | 0.134 0.010 | 0.64 0.029 | 99.6 0.6 | 112 3 | 185 13 |
| Sampled futures (30) | 0.151 0.008 | 0.69 0.026 | 92.1 0.6 | 13140 328 | 6200 474 |
| DSWM (SFT) | 0.133 0.008 | 0.69 0.027 | 96.8 0.5 | 760 17 | 1160 96 |
| DSWM (SFT + GRPO) | 0.116 0.011 | 0.71 0.030 | 98.1 0.5 | 812 25 | 1280 91 |
| Magentic-NL | SOTOPIA | AgentSense | ProMediate | SOTOPIA-ToM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comparison | Cust. util. | Goal | Goal | Cons. chg. | InfoMgmt |
| SFT direct expectation | |||||
| Full direct expectation | |||||
| Full sampled futures | |||||
| Full SFT | |||||
| Full without response text |
| Environment | Predictor | RMSE | Regret | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magentic-NL | Single future | 0.201 0.010 | 0.43 0.038 | 0.118 0.008 |
| Direct expectation | 0.171 0.009 | 0.58 0.027 | 0.086 0.006 | |
| Sampled futures (30) | 0.145 0.009 | 0.66 0.029 | 0.071 0.006 | |
| DSWM (SFT) | 0.139 0.010 | 0.68 0.032 | 0.065 0.007 | |
| DSWM (SFT + GRPO) | 0.127 0.007 | 0.73 0.030 | 0.054 0.009 | |
| SOTOPIA | Single future | 0.178 0.008 | 0.49 0.024 | 0.094 0.005 |
| Magentic-NL | SOTOPIA | AgentSense | ProMediate | SOTOPIA-ToM | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JS | Cust. util. | Goal | Goal | Cons. chg. | InfoMgmt | |
| 0.00 | 0.00 | 272.82 7.91 | 8.21 0.20 | 0.720 0.023 | 0.0628 0.0047 | 0.2508 0.0119 |
| 0.25 | 0.04 | 265.73 8.24 | 8.23 0.22 | 0.700 0.025 | 0.0622 0.0049 | 0.2460 0.0124 |
| 0.50 | 0.10 | 251.27 8.86 | 8.02 0.24 | 0.680 0.028 | 0.0602 0.0052 | 0.2347 0.0131 |
| 0.75 | 0.18 | 230.81 9.42 | 7.73 0.27 | 0.650 0.030 | 0.0581 0.0056 | 0.2202 0.0143 |
| 1.00 | 0.28 | 209.53 10.17 | 7.36 0.30 | 0.610 0.033 | 0.0536 0.0060 | 0.2021 0.0155 |
| ProMediate | SOTOPIA-ToM | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Measures | Cons. chg. | Topic eff. | Med. intel. | InfoMgmt | DA | IA | CPV | EFF |
| 5 (20%) | 0.0506 0.0062 | 0.0030 0.0006 | 3.5742 0.244 | 0.1851 0.0176 | 0.4512 0.0311 | 0.1286 0.0187 | 0.3041 0.0356 | 0.8214 0.0412 |
| 10 (40%) | 0.0546 0.0058 | 0.0032 0.0005 | 3.8147 0.223 | 0.2079 0.0158 | 0.4807 0.0297 | 0.1423 0.0172 | 0.2870 0.0311 | 0.8538 0.0376 |
| 15 (60%) | 0.0582 0.0054 | 0.0035 0.0005 | 4.0613 0.205 | 0.2280 0.0144 | 0.5085 0.0279 | 0.1551 0.0159 | 0.2674 0.0254 | 0.8846 0.0340 |
| 20 (80%) | 0.0610 0.0049 | 0.0037 0.0004 | 4.2418 0.193 | 0.2423 0.0128 | 0.5284 0.0256 | 0.1652 0.0139 | 0.2519 0.0210 | 0.9041 0.0319 |
| 25 (100%) | 0.0628 0.0047 | 0.0038 0.0004 | 4.3321 0.185 | 0.2508 0.0119 | 0.5398 0.0243 | 0.1695 0.0128 | 0.2450 0.0173 | 0.9138 0.0300 |
World Model-Based Planning
World model-based planning uses models of how environments change to compare imagined actions and choose goal-directed behavior.
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