Large Language Model-Based Social Simulation

Ask about this topic

Overview

This field uses language-model agents to model people interacting through networks, institutions, and shared environments, studying outcomes such as opinion change, cooperation, norms, mobility, and policy responses. Common approaches ground agents in surveys, interviews, behavioral histories, or psychological profiles, then combine prompting or fine-tuning with agent-based models, games, memory, and network dynamics. Researchers validate simulations against human surveys, experiments, and real-world traces, measuring both individual response distributions and collective patterns over time. A central challenge is that plausible dialogue or accurate averages do not ensure faithful individual behavior, diverse populations, causal conclusions, or robust results across models and settings.

Latest papers

CardsList

261 papers53 papers in the last four weeks, up 66% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Apr 12, 2026

Diversity Without Fidelity: A Solver-Sampler Mismatch in Multi-Agent LLM Negotiation Simulation

Language models are increasingly used to simulate people: survey respondents, negotiators, stakeholders in policy exercises. In that role a model should reproduce how people plausibly behave, hesitating, conceding late, and settling for imperfect deals, rather than playing the best move. We call this the sampler role, in contrast to the solver role of finding the best move, and we test how the reasoning modes providers ship to strengthen models as solvers affect it. Our testbed is multi-party negotiation: five agents bargain over a regulation for fifteen turns, and unresolved issues are decided by an authority. Agents without a structured memory of the negotiation almost never reach agreement, whether reasoning is on or off: 314 of 315 such runs end with the authority deciding. What reasoning changes is how the failure looks. With reasoning enabled, one model family negotiates visibly, with varied moves, concessions in most runs, and a different path every time, yet still ends without agreement in fifteen runs of fifteen. Diversity checks would pass a model whose endings never change. Two further results show the task permits agreement: when agents write their own short running notes on the negotiation, agreement becomes the norm, while the same notes supplied ready-made change nothing; and hand-coded agents following textbook concession strategies agree in most runs under identical rules. Simulation pipelines should therefore vet models as samplers, on the distributions of outcomes they produce. Fidelity as a sampler must be tested on its own: solver strength is no guide to it, and switching on reasoning leaves it where it was.

Sandro Andric

Multi-Agent LLM SystemsMulti-Agent NegotiationAutomated NegotiationLLM Agent EvaluationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation
AskPDF
Apr 12, 2026

Handle with CARE: Can LLMs Reproduce How Online Communities React?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as proxies for computational social analysis, yet faithfully representing the "thick descriptions" (Geertz, 1973) of human communities remains a critical challenge. Current evaluations often reduce social identity to static labels, sidelining how real-world groups navigate social shifts. To bridge this gap, we introduce CARE (Community-Aware Reaction Evaluation), a reaction-centered framework that benchmarks LLM-simulated discourse against the authentic, event-contingent responses of distinct communities to real-world news. Spanning 207 Reddit communities and covering 9,947 authentic reactions towards 2,166 news articles, CARE evaluates leading LLMs using a hierarchical taxonomy covering coarse attitudes and fine-grained communicative tones. Our empirical findings expose two critical failure modes in prevailing community-conditioning paradigms. First, while community context and targeted reasoning significantly enhance macro-level attitudinal and tonal profiling, these gains largely collapse at the instance level when predicting reactions to specific events. Second, the benefits of community conditioning are remarkably uneven: prompting strategies yield non-uniform shifts, where fidelity gains in some communities are offset by performance drops in others. This micro-macro divergence and community-level instability demonstrate that standard conditioning enables models to approximate static baseline profiles without capturing dynamic or equitable event reactions, establishing CARE as an essential diagnostic tool for community-aware social simulation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/nuankw/Handle_with_CARE.

Nuan Wen, Chanbin Lim, Xuezhe Ma

Information Sciences Institute University of Southern California

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationLLM Evaluation
AskPDF
Apr 12, 2026

PEMAND: Persona-Enriched Multi-Agent Negotiation for Household Decision-Making

Modeling household-level decisions is central to many real-world applications, including trip planning, residential mobility and migration, disaster management, etc. Existing studies primarily rely on classical machine learning models with limited predictive capacity, while recent LLM-based approaches have yet to incorporate behavioral theory or intra-household interaction dynamics, both of which are essential for modeling realistic household decisions. To address these limitations, we propose Persona-Enriched Multi-Agent Negotiation for household Decision-making (PEMAND), a novel LLM-based framework that integrates behavioral theory into individualized, household-aware persona modeling and simulates household-level decision-making through structured multi-agent negotiation. Specifically, PEMAND transforms static sociodemographic attributes into coherent narrative profiles that explicitly encode household-level attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral controls, following our proposed Household-Aware Chain-of-Planned-Behavior (HA-CoPB) framework. Building on these theory-grounded personas, PEMAND captures real-world household decision negotiation via a structured two-phase multi-agent conversation framework with a novel persona-alignment control mechanism. Evaluated on national and regional household decision datasets across two major domains, including travel behavior and residential mobility, PEMAND consistently outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks.

Yuran Sun, Mustafa Sameen, Yaotian Zhang +5

University of Florida

Human Behavior SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationMulti-Agent Negotiation
AskPDF
Apr 10, 2026

CONSCIENTIA: Can LLM Agents Learn to Strategize? Emergent Deception and Trust in a Multi-Agent NYC Simulation

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, understanding how strategic behavior emerges in multi-agent environments has become an important alignment challenge. We take a neutral empirical stance and construct a controlled environment in which strategic behavior can be directly observed and measured. We introduce a large-scale multi-agent simulation in a simplified model of New York City, where LLM-driven agents interact under opposing incentives. Blue agents aim to reach their destinations efficiently, while Red agents attempt to divert them toward billboard-heavy routes using persuasive language to maximize advertising revenue. Hidden identities make navigation socially mediated, forcing agents to decide when to trust or deceive. We study policy learning through an iterative simulation pipeline that updates agent policies across repeated interaction rounds using Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO). Blue agents are optimized to reduce billboard exposure while preserving navigation efficiency, whereas Red agents adapt to exploit remaining weaknesses. Across iterations, the best Blue policy improves task success from 46.0% to 57.3%, although susceptibility remains high at 70.7%. Later policies exhibit stronger selective cooperation while preserving trajectory efficiency. However, a persistent safety-helpfulness trade-off remains: policies that better resist adversarial steering do not simultaneously maximize task completion. Overall, our results show that LLM agents can exhibit limited strategic behavior, including selective trust and deception, while remaining highly vulnerable to adversarial persuasion.

Aarush Sinha, Arion Das, Soumyadeep Nag +7

University of Copenhagen · IIIT Ranchi · ISI Kolkata +6

Strategic Reasoning Risks in Language ModelsEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent SystemsLLM Agent SafetyMulti-Agent SystemsLLM Agent TrainingLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation
AskPDF
Apr 8, 2026

SYN-DIGITS: A Synthetic Control Framework for Calibrated Digital Twin Simulation

AI-based persona simulation -- often referred to as digital twin simulation -- is increasingly used for market research, recommender systems, and social sciences. Despite their flexibility, large language models (LLMs) often exhibit systematic bias and miscalibration relative to real human behavior, limiting their reliability. Inspired by synthetic control methods from causal inference, we propose SYN-DIGITS (SYNthetic Control Framework for Calibrated DIGItal Twin Simulation), a principled and lightweight calibration framework that learns latent structure from digital-twin responses and transfers it to align predictions with human ground truth. SYN-DIGITS operates as a post-processing layer on top of any LLM-based simulator and thus is model-agnostic. We develop a latent factor model that formalizes when and why calibration succeeds through latent space alignment conditions, and we systematically evaluate ten calibration methods across thirteen persona constructions, three LLMs, and two datasets. SYN-DIGITS supports both individual-level and distributional simulation for previously unseen questions and unobserved populations, with provable error guarantees. Experiments show that SYN-DIGITS achieves up to 50% relative improvements in individual-level correlation and 50--90% relative reductions in distributional discrepancy compared to uncalibrated baselines.

Grace Jiarui Fan, Chengpiao Huang, Tianyi Peng +2

Finance Division, Columbia Business School. · Department of IEOR, Columbia University · Decision, Risk, and Operations Division, Columbia Business School. +1

Synthetic ControlLanguage Model CalibrationLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationHuman Behavior SimulationDigital Twins
AskPDF
Apr 8, 2026

Restoring Heterogeneity in LLM-based Social Simulation: An Audience Segmentation Approach

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate social attitudes and behaviors, offering scalable "silicon samples" that can approximate human data. However, current simulation practice often collapses diversity into an "average persona," masking subgroup variation that is central to social reality. This study introduces audience segmentation as a systematic approach for restoring heterogeneity in LLM-based social simulation. Using U.S. climate-opinion survey data, we compare six segmentation configurations across two open-weight LLMs (Llama 3.1-70B and Mixtral 8x22B), varying segmentation identifier granularity, parsimony, and selection logic (theory-driven, data-driven, and instrument-based). We evaluate simulation performance with a three-dimensional evaluation framework covering distributional, structural, and predictive fidelity. Results show that increasing identifier granularity does not produce consistent improvement: moderate enrichment can improve performance, but further expansion does not reliably help and can worsen structural and predictive fidelity. Across parsimony comparisons, compact configurations often match or outperform more comprehensive alternatives, especially in structural and predictive fidelity, while distributional fidelity remains metric dependent. Identifier selection logic determines which fidelity dimension benefits most: instrument-based selection best preserves distributional shape, whereas data-driven selection best recovers between-group structure and identifier-outcome associations. Overall, no single configuration dominates all dimensions, and performance gains in one dimension can coincide with losses in another. These findings position audience segmentation as a core methodological approach for valid LLM-based social simulation and highlight the need for heterogeneity-aware evaluation and variance-preserving modeling strategies.

Xiaoyou Qin, Zhihong Li, Xiaoxiao Cheng

School of Journalism, Fudan University · College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationUser ModelingLLM Evaluation
AskPDF
Apr 7, 2026

Context-Value-Action Architecture for Value-Driven Large Language Model Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating human behavior, yet existing agents often exhibit behavioral rigidity, a flaw frequently masked by the self-referential bias of current "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluations. By evaluating against empirical ground truth, we reveal a counter-intuitive phenomenon: increasing the intensity of prompt-driven reasoning does not enhance fidelity but rather exacerbates value polarization, collapsing population diversity. To address this, we propose the Context-Value-Action (CVA) architecture, grounded in the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model and Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values. Unlike methods relying on self-verification, CVA decouples action generation from cognitive reasoning via a novel Value Verifier trained on authentic human data to explicitly model dynamic value activation. Experiments on CVABench, which comprises over 1.1 million real-world interaction traces, demonstrate that CVA significantly outperforms baselines. Our approach effectively mitigates polarization while offering superior behavioral fidelity and interpretability.

TianZe Zhang, Sirui Sun, Yuhang Xie +3

State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University · Yuanpei College, Peking University · School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University +2

Human Behavior ModelingLLM AgentsLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationAI Agent Evaluation
AskPDF
Apr 7, 2026

Human Values Matter: Investigating How Misalignment Shapes Collective Behaviors in LLM Agent Communities

As LLMs become increasingly integrated into human society, evaluating their orientations on human values from social science has drawn growing attention. Nevertheless, it is still unclear why human values matter for LLMs, especially in LLM-based multi-agent systems, where group-level failures may accumulate from individually misaligned actions. We ask whether misalignment with human values alters the collective behavior of LLM agents and what changes it induces? In this work, we introduce CIVA, a controlled multi-agent environment grounded in social science theories, where LLM agents form a community and autonomously communicate, explore, and compete for resources, enabling systematic manipulation of value prevalence and behavioral analysis. Through comprehensive simulation experiments, we reveal three key findings. (1) We identify several structurally critical values that substantially shape the community's collective dynamics, including those diverging from LLMs' original orientations. Triggered by the misspecification of these values, we (2) detect system failure modes, e.g., catastrophic collapse, at the macro level, and (3) observe emergent behaviors like deception and power-seeking at the micro level. These results offer quantitative evidence that human values are essential for collective outcomes in LLMs and motivate future multi-agent value alignment.

Xiangxu Zhang, Jiamin Wang, Qinlin Zhao +6

Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China · Microsoft Research Asia · Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University

Emergent Misalignment in Language ModelsEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent SystemsMulti-Agent SystemsLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation
AskPDF
Apr 6, 2026

What Makes a Sale? Simulating End-to-End Seller--Buyer Retail Dynamics with LLM Agents

Evaluating retail strategies before deployment is difficult, as outcomes are determined across multiple stages, from seller-side persuasion through buyer-seller interaction to purchase decisions. However, existing retail simulators capture only partial aspects of this process and do not model cross-stage dependencies, making it difficult to assess how early decisions affect downstream outcomes. We present RetailSim, an end-to-end retail simulation framework that models this pipeline in a unified environment, explicitly designed for simulation fidelity through diverse product spaces, persona-driven agents, and multi-turn interactions. We evaluate RetailSim with a dual protocol comprising human evaluation of behavioral fidelity and meta-evaluation against real-world economic regularities, showing that it successfully reproduces key patterns such as demographic purchasing behavior, the price-demand relationship, and heterogeneous price elasticity. We further demonstrate its practical utility via decision-oriented use cases, including persona inference, seller-buyer interaction analysis, and sales strategy evaluation, showing RetailSim's potential as a controlled testbed for exploring retail strategies.

Jeonghwan Choi, Jibin Hwang, Gyeonghun Sun +4

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) · GS Retail · Cluvion

User SimulationHuman Behavior SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Role-Play SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation
AskPDF
Apr 6, 2026

Optimizing Service Operations via LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Simulation

Service system performance depends on how participants respond to design choices, but modeling these responses is hard due to the complexity of human behavior. We introduce an LLM-powered multi-agent simulation (LLM-MAS) framework for optimizing service operations. We pose the problem as stochastic optimization with decision-dependent uncertainty: design choices are embedded in prompts and shape the distribution of outcomes from interacting LLM-powered agents. By embedding key numerical information in prompts and extracting it from LLM-generated text, we model this uncertainty as a controlled Markov chain. We develop an on-trajectory learning algorithm that, on a single simulation run, simultaneously constructs zeroth-order gradient estimates and updates design parameters to optimize steady-state performance. We also incorporate variance reduction techniques. In a sustainable supply chain application, our method outperforms benchmarks, including blackbox optimization and using LLMs as numerical solvers or as role-playing system designers. A case study on optimal contest design with real behavioral data shows that LLM-MAS is both as a cost-effective evaluator of known designs and an exploratory tool that can uncover strong designs overlooked by traditional approaches.

Yanyuan Wang, Xiaowei Zhang

Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong SAR

Stochastic OptimizationDecision-Making under UncertaintyMulti-Agent LLM SystemsLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationZeroth-Order Optimization
AskPDF
Apr 5, 2026

From Plausible to Causal: Counterfactual Semantics for Policy Evaluation in Simulated Online Communities

LLM-based social simulations can generate believable community interactions, enabling policy wind tunnels'' where governance interventions are tested before deployment. But believability is not causality. Claims like intervention AA reduces escalation'' require causal semantics that current simulation work typically does not specify. We propose adopting the causal counterfactual framework, distinguishing necessary causation (would the outcome have occurred without the intervention?) from sufficient causation (does the intervention reliably produce the outcome?). This distinction maps onto different stakeholder needs: moderators diagnosing incidents require evidence about necessity, while platform designers choosing policies require evidence about sufficiency. We formalize this mapping, show how simulation design can support estimation under explicit assumptions, and argue that the resulting quantities should be interpreted as simulator-conditional causal estimates whose policy relevance depends on simulator fidelity. Establishing this framework now is essential: it helps define what adequate fidelity means and moves the field from simulations that look realistic toward simulations that can support policy changes.

Agam Goyal, Yian Wang, Eshwar Chandrasekharan +1

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

Counterfactual EvaluationLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationCausal InferenceActual Causality
AskPDF
Apr 4, 2026

LLM-Agent-based Social Simulation for Attitude Diffusion

This paper introduces discourse_simulator, an open-source framework that combines LLMs with agent-based modelling. It offers a new way to simulate how public attitudes toward immigration change over time in response to salient events like protests, controversies, or policy debates. Large language models (LLMs) are used to generate social media posts, interpret opinions, and model how ideas spread through social networks. Unlike traditional agent-based models that rely on fixed, rule-based opinion updates and cannot generate natural language or consider current events, this approach integrates multidimensional sociological belief structures and real-world event timelines. This framework is wrapped into an open-source Python package that integrates generative agents into a small-world network topology and a live news retrieval system. discourse_sim is purpose-built as a social science research instrument specifically for studying attitude dynamics, polarisation, and belief evolution following real-world critical events. Unlike other LLM Agent Swarm frameworks, which treat the simulations as a prediction black box, discourse_sim treats it as a theory-testing instrument, which is fundamentally a different epistemological stance for studying social science problems. The paper further demonstrates the framework by modelling the Dublin anti-immigration march on April 26, 2025, with N=100 agents over a 15-day simulation. Package link: https://pypi.org/project/discourse-sim/

Deepak John Reji

Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationComputational Social ScienceHuman Behavior SimulationAgent-Based Modeling
AskPDF
Apr 2, 2026

Statistical realism is not evidence that LLMs can estimate treatment effects in social science experiments

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human responses and estimate treatment effect of interventions when real-world experiments are costly or infeasible. The treatment-effect estimates are often evaluated using statistical realism, the degree to which simulated responses reproduce properties of observed human responses, although whether realism predicts treatment-effect accuracy remains unknown. Here we test this proxy relationship by jointly measuring statistical realism and treatment-effect accuracy on the same simulated responses in a cross-national experiment with 59,508 participants from 62 countries using three LLMs. The correlation between statistical realism and treatment-effect accuracy is weak, and optimizing for statistical realism can even worsen treatment-effect accuracy when selecting models, prompts, and target populations. The pattern replicates in two additional cross-national experiments spanning 12 and 27 countries with 20,785 participants. The divergence between the two reflects distinct error structures and is larger for behavioral outcomes, where models appear to extrapolate behavioral effects from attitudinal patterns. Because this divergence may remain hidden in deployment, errors can propagate into simulation-informed decisions. We introduce a diagnostic framework for LLM-generated synthetic data and discuss how treatment-effect validation should proceed under varying availability of experimental benchmarks. Simulated responses and simulated treatment effects are distinct estimation targets, and evidence for one does not certify the other.

Zonghan Li, Feng Ji

Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, ON, Canada

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationSynthetic Data EvaluationCausal Effect Estimation
AskPDF
Apr 2, 2026

LLM Agents as Social Scientists: A Human-AI Collaborative Platform for Social Science Automation

Traditional social science research often requires designing complex experiments across vast methodological spaces and depends on real human participants, making it labor-intensive, costly, and difficult to scale. Here we present S-Researcher, an LLM-agent-based platform that assists researchers in conducting social science research more efficiently and at greater scale by "siliconizing" both the research process and the participant pool. To build S-Researcher, we first develop YuLan-OneSim, a large-scale social simulation system designed around three core requirements: generality via auto-programming from natural language to executable scenarios, scalability via a distributed architecture supporting up to 100,000 concurrent agents, and reliability via feedback-driven LLM fine-tuning. Leveraging this system, S-Researcher supports researchers in designing social experiments, simulating human behavior with LLM agents, analyzing results, and generating reports, forming a complete human-AI collaborative research loop in which researchers retain oversight and intervention at every stage. We operationalize LLM simulation research paradigms into three canonical reasoning modes (induction, deduction, and abduction) and validate S-Researcher through systematic case studies: inductive reproduction of cultural dynamics consistent with Axelrod's theory, deductive testing of competing hypotheses on teacher attention validated against survey data, and abductive identification of a cooperation mechanism in public goods games confirmed by human experiments. S-Researcher establishes a new human--AI collaborative paradigm for social science, in which computational simulation augments human researchers to accelerate discovery across the full spectrum of social inquiry.

Lei Wang, Yuanzi Li, Jinchao Wu +4

Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Big Data Management and Analysis Methods, Beijing, China

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationComputational Social ScienceHuman-AI CollaborationHuman Behavior SimulationMulti-Agent LLM Systems
AskPDF
Mar 31, 2026

LLM Agents Predict Social Media Reactions but Do Not Outperform Text Classifiers: Benchmarking Simulation Accuracy Using 120K+ Personas of 1511 Humans

Social media platforms mediate how billions form opinions and engage with public discourse. As autonomous AI agents increasingly participate in these spaces, understanding their behavioral fidelity becomes critical for platform governance and democratic resilience. Previous work demonstrates that LLM-powered agents can replicate aggregate survey responses, yet few studies test whether agents can predict specific individuals' reactions to specific content. This study benchmarks LLM-based agents' accuracy in predicting human social media reactions (like, dislike, comment, share, no reaction) across 120,000+ unique agent-persona combinations derived from 1,511 Serbian participants and 27 large language models. In Study 1, agents achieved 70.7% overall accuracy, with LLM choice producing a 13 percentage-point performance spread. Study 2 employed binary forced-choice (like/dislike) evaluation with chance-corrected metrics. Agents achieved Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.29, indicating genuine predictive signal beyond chance. However, conventional text-based supervised classifiers using TF-IDF representations outperformed LLM agents (MCC of 0.36), suggesting predictive gains reflect semantic access rather than uniquely agentic reasoning. The genuine predictive validity of zero-shot persona-prompted agents warns against potential manipulation through easily deploying swarms of behaviorally distinct AI agents on social media, while simultaneously offering opportunities to use such agents in simulations for predicting polarization dynamics and informing AI policy. The advantage of using zero-shot agents is that they require no task-specific training, making their large-scale deployment easy across diverse contexts. Limitations include single-country sampling. Future research should explore multilingual testing and fine-tuning approaches.

Ljubisa Bojic, Alexander Felfernig, Bojana Dinic +4

Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research and Development of Serbia · University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Digital Society Lab · Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria +4

LLM Agent EvaluationHuman Behavior SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Role-Play SimulationSocial Media Analysis
AskPDF
Mar 31, 2026

BotVerse: Real-Time Event-Driven Simulation of Social Agents

BotVerse is a scalable, event-driven framework for high-fidelity social simulation using LLM-based agents. It addresses the ethical risks of studying autonomous agents on live networks by isolating interactions within a controlled environment while grounding them in real-time content streams from the Bluesky ecosystem. The system features an asynchronous orchestration API and a simulation engine that emulates human-like temporal patterns and cognitive memory. Through the Synthetic Social Observatory, researchers can deploy customizable personas and observe multimodal interactions at scale. We demonstrate BotVersevia a coordinated disinformation scenario, providing a safe, experimental framework for red-teaming and computational social scientists. A video demonstration of the framework is available at https://youtu.be/eZSzO5Jarqk.

Edoardo Allegrini, Edoardo Di Paolo, Angelo Spognardi +1

Computer Science Dept., Sapienza University of Rome · IIT-CNR & Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationHuman Behavior SimulationLLM Agent Orchestration
AskPDF
Mar 31, 2026

Beyond Individual Mimicry: Constructing Human-Like Social network with Graph-Augmented LLM Agents

Driven by large language models (LLMs), social bot can autonomously engage in local interactions, whose human-like behaviors enable them to evade social bot detection. However, while these botnets exhibit realistic local social interactions, they fail to preserve human-like social network. This is because LLM-based bots are graph-unaware and cannot coordinate over global interactions, which makes those botnets vulnerable to graph neural network (GNN)-based detection. To address this limitation, we propose GraphMind, which equips LLM-driven social bots to explicitly learn and fit human-like social network structures. Building on this foundation, we further construct GraphMind-Botnet, a LLM-driven botnet designed to evaluate the performance of existing social bot detection algorithms. Experiments on datasets derived from GraphMind-Botnet show that both text-based and graph-based detection models show substantially degraded performance in distinguishing. Our results highlight the critical role of social link construction in LLM-driven social network generation, while exposing fundamental weaknesses in existing bot detection mechanisms.

Haoran Bu, Litian Zhang, Chuxuan Zhang +3

Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Social Bot DetectionLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationSynthetic Data Generation
AskPDF
Mar 30, 2026

Synonymix: Unified Group Personas for Generative Simulations

Generative agent simulations operate at two scales: individual personas for character interaction, and population models for collective behavior analysis and intervention testing. We propose a third scale: meso-level simulation - interaction with group-level representations that retain grounding in rich individual experience. To enable this, we present Synonymix, a pipeline that constructs a "unigraph" from multiple life story personas via graph-based abstraction and merging, producing a queryable collective representation that can be explored for sensemaking or sampled for synthetic persona generation. Evaluating synthetic agents on General Social Survey items, we demonstrate behavioral signal preservation beyond demographic baselines (p<0.001, r=0.59) with demonstrable privacy guarantee (max source contribution <13%). We invite discussion on interaction modalities enabled by meso-level simulations, and whether "high-fidelity" personas can ever capture the texture of lived experience.

Huanxing Chen, Aditesh Kumar

Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Human Behavior SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationSynthetic Data GenerationPersona-Conditioned Generation
AskPDF
Mar 28, 2026

Persona-Based Simulation of Human Opinion at Population Scale

What does it mean to model a person, not merely to predict isolated responses, preferences, or behaviors, but to simulate how an individual interprets events, forms opinions, makes judgments, and acts consistently across contexts? This question matters because social science requires not only observing and predicting human outcomes, but also simulating interventions and their consequences. Although large language models (LLMs) can generate human-like answers, most existing approaches remain predictive, relying on demographic correlations rather than representations of individuals themselves. We introduce SPIRIT (Semi-structured Persona Inference and Reasoning for Individualized Trajectories), a framework designed explicitly for simulation rather than prediction. SPIRIT infers psychologically grounded, semi-structured personas from public social media posts, integrating structured attributes (e.g., personality traits and world beliefs) with unstructured narrative text reflecting values and lived experience. These personas prompt LLM-based agents to act as specific individuals when answering survey questions or responding to events. Using the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, a nationally representative probability sample of U.S. adults, we show that SPIRIT-conditioned simulations recover self-reported responses more faithfully than demographic persona and reproduce human-like heterogeneity in response patterns. We further demonstrate that persona banks can function as virtual respondent panels for studying both stable attitudes and time-sensitive public opinion.

Mao Li, Frederick G. Conrad

Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson St., Ann Arbor, 48104, MI, US.

Human Behavior SimulationLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationPersona-Conditioned GenerationComputational Social ScienceOpinion Dynamics
AskPDF
Mar 27, 2026

Deception and Communication in Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems: An Experimental Study with Among Us

As large language models are deployed as autonomous agents, their capacity for strategic deception raises core questions for coordination, reliability, and safety in multi-goal, multi-agent systems. We study deception and communication in L2LM agents through the social deduction game Among Us, a cooperative-competitive environment. Across 1,100 games, autonomous agents produced over one million tokens of meeting dialogue. Using speech act theory and interpersonal deception theory, we find that all agents rely mainly on directive language, while impostor agents shift slightly toward representative acts such as explanations and denials. Deception appears primarily as equivocation rather than outright lies, increasing under social pressure but rarely improving win rates. Our contributions are a large-scale analysis of role-conditioned deceptive behavior in LLM agents and empirical evidence that current agents favor low-risk ambiguity that is linguistically subtle yet strategically limited, revealing a fundamental tension between truthfulness and utility in autonomous communication.

Maria Milkowski, Tim Weninger

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, United States

Deception in Language ModelsMulti-Agent CommunicationStrategic Reasoning Risks in Language ModelsLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation
AskPDF
Mar 26, 2026

Belief-Driven Multi-Agent Collaboration via Approximate Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium for Social Simulation

High-fidelity social simulation is pivotal for addressing complex Web societal challenges, yet it demands agents capable of authentically replicating the dynamic spectrum of human interaction. Current LLM-based multi-agent frameworks, however, predominantly adhere to static interaction topologies, failing to capture the fluid oscillation between cooperative knowledge synthesis and competitive critical reasoning seen in real-world scenarios. This rigidity often leads to unrealistic ``groupthink'' or unproductive deadlocks, undermining the credibility of simulations for decision support. To bridge this gap, we propose BEACOF, a belief-driven adaptive collaboration framework inspired by Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium (PBE). By modeling social interaction as a dynamic game of incomplete information, BEACOF rigorously addresses the circular dependency between collaboration type selection and capability estimation. Agents iteratively refine probabilistic beliefs about peer capabilities and autonomously modulate their collaboration strategy, thereby ensuring sequentially rational decisions under uncertainty. Validated across adversarial (judicial), open-ended (social) and mixed (medical) scenarios, BEACOF prevents coordination failures and fosters robust convergence toward high-quality solutions, demonstrating superior potential for reliable social simulation. Source codes and datasets are publicly released at: https://github.com/WUT-IDEA/BEACOF.

Weiwei Fang, Lin Li, Kaize Shi +2

Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China · University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia · The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China +1

Multi-Agent CollaborationMulti-Agent CoordinationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation
AskPDF
Mar 25, 2026

When Is Collective Intelligence a Lottery? Multi-Agent Scaling Laws for Memetic Drift in LLMs

Multi-agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that shape consequential decisions, both directly and indirectly. Yet it remains unclear whether their outcomes reflect collective reasoning, systematic bias, or mere chance. Recent work has sharpened this question with naming games, showing that even when no individual agent favors any label a priori, populations rapidly break symmetry and reach consensus. Here, we reveal the mechanism by introducing a minimal model, Quantized Simplex Gossip (QSG), and trace the microscopic origin of this agreement to mutual in-context learning. In QSG, agents maintain internal belief states but learn from one another's sampled outputs, so one agent's arbitrary choice becomes the next agent's evidence and can compound toward agreement. By analogy with neutral evolution, we call this sampling-driven regime memetic drift. QSG predicts a crossover from a drift-dominated regime, where consensus is effectively a lottery, to a selection regime, where weak biases are amplified and shape the outcome. We derive scaling laws for drift-induced polarization as a function of population size, communication bandwidth, in-context adaptation rate, and agents' internal uncertainty, and we validate them in both QSG simulations and naming-game experiments with LLM populations. Together, these results provide a framework for studying the collective mechanisms of social representation formation in multi-agent systems.

Hidenori Tanaka

CBS–NTT Program in Physics of Intelligence, Center for Brain Science, Harvard University · Physics of Artificial Intelligence Group, NTT Research, Inc.

Multi-Agent SystemsMulti-Agent ConsensusEmergent Behavior in Multi-Agent SystemsLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationMulti-Agent Communication
AskPDF
Mar 24, 2026

Beyond Preset Identities: Selective Stance Accommodation and Interaction Reorganisation in Generative Agent Societies

Generative agent societies simulate people with assigned roles, preferences and relationships. As agents exchange arguments and choose partners, they can revise their positions and reorganise discussion. Understanding these changes requires examining what they accept and how they continue to interact. Stance-change scores and communication totals describe the extent of change. However, the same stance movement can preserve or reverse an assigned preference, and frequent communication can support either agreement or continuing disagreement. We therefore examine the content of changed positions and the exchanges that strengthen particular partnerships. Using Computational Multi-Agent Society Experiments (CMASE), we combine stance measures, source evaluations and temporal networks with individual answers and messages. Study 1 compares seven conditions across ten GPT-4o runs per condition, with a separate interview collection covering four models. Study 2 follows one 75-step GPT-4o café simulation. Environmental rational persuasion yields the largest mean stance departure (1.30±0.081.30\pm0.08 on a 7-point scale), whereas economic emotional persuasion yields the highest low-trust stance-shift rate (17.3%±11.2%17.3\%\pm11.2\%, with standard deviations across runs). In the separate interviews, eight environmental agents shift from 7 to 6, acknowledge economic concerns and rate the source 3. Their partial acceptance preserves the assigned environmental preference. In the café, a pair with zero earlier exchanges becomes the most frequent final-phase partnership, with 25 messages. Its members develop coordination proposals while disputing their implementation. These results show that partial acceptance can coexist with low source trust, and sustained coordination with continuing disagreement.

Hanzhong Zhang, Siyang Song, Lu Liu +1

Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom · Department of Data Science, William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, United States

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationMulti-Agent CommunicationMulti-Agent SystemsOpinion DynamicsComputational Social Science
AskPDF
Mar 24, 2026

Emergence of Fragility in LLM-based Social Networks: the Case of Moltbook

The rapid diffusion of large language models and the growth in their capability has enabled the emergence of online environments populated by autonomous AI agents that interact through natural language. These platforms provide a novel empirical setting for studying collective dynamics among artificial agents. In this paper we analyze the interaction network of Moltbook, a social platform composed entirely of LLM based agents, using tools from network science. The dataset comprises 39,924 users, 235,572 posts, and 1,540,238 comments collected through web scraping. We construct a directed weighted network in which nodes represent agents and edges represent commenting interactions. Our analysis reveals strongly heterogeneous connectivity patterns characterized by heavy tailed degree and activity distributions. At the mesoscale, the network exhibits a pronounced core periphery organization in which a very small structural core (0.9% of nodes) concentrates a large fraction of connectivity. Robustness experiments show that the network is relatively resilient to random node removal but highly vulnerable to targeted attacks on highly connected nodes, particularly those with high out degree. These findings indicate that the interaction structure of AI agent social systems may develop strong centralization and structural fragility, providing new insights into the collective organization of LLM native social environments.

Luca Sodano, Sofia Sciangula, Amulya Galmarini +1

School of Industrial Engineering, Intelligence, Complexity and Technology Lab (ICT Lab), LIUC - Università Cattaneo, Castellanza (Italy), 21053 · Intelligence, Complexity and Technology Lab (ICT Lab), LIUC - Università Cattaneo, Castellanza (Italy), 21053

Social Network AnalysisMulti-Agent LLM SystemsSocial Media AnalysisComputational Social ScienceLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationAgentic AI
AskPDF
Mar 24, 2026

Analysing LLM Persona Generation and Fairness Interpretation in Polarised Geopolitical Contexts

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilised for social simulation and persona generation, necessitating an understanding of how they represent geopolitical identities. In this paper, we analyse personas generated for Palestinian and Israeli identities by five popular LLMs across 640 experimental conditions, varying context (war vs non-war) and assigned roles. We observe significant distributional patterns in the generated attributes: Palestinian profiles in war contexts are frequently associated with lower socioeconomic status and survival-oriented roles, whereas Israeli profiles predominantly retain middle-class status and specialised professional attributes. When prompted with explicit instructions to avoid harmful assumptions, models exhibit diverse distributional changes, e.g., marked increases in non-binary gender inferences or a convergence toward generic occupational roles (e.g., "student"), while the underlying socioeconomic distinctions often remain. Furthermore, analysis of reasoning traces reveals an interesting dynamics between model reasoning and generation: while rationales consistently mention fairness-related concepts, the final generated personas follow the aforementioned diverse distributional changes. These findings illustrate a picture of how models interpret geopolitical contexts, while suggesting that they process fairness and adjust in varied ways; there is no consistent, direct translation of fairness concepts into representative outcomes.

Maida Aizaz, Quang Minh Nguyen

Graduate School of Data Science KAIST

Political Bias in Language ModelsDemographic Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias EvaluationLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationPersona-Conditioned Generation
AskPDF
Mar 21, 2026

Do LLM-Driven Agents Exhibit Engagement Mechanisms? Controlled Tests of Information Load, Descriptive Norms, and Popularity Cues

Large language models make agent-based simulation more behaviorally expressive, but they also sharpen a basic methodological tension: fluent, human-like output is not, by itself, evidence for theory. We evaluate what an LLM-driven simulation can credibly support using information engagement on social media as a test case. In a Weibo-like environment, we manipulate information load and descriptive norms, while allowing popularity cues (cumulative likes and Sina Weibo-style cumulative reshares) to evolve endogenously. We then ask whether simulated behavior changes in theoretically interpretable ways under these controlled variations, rather than merely producing plausible-looking traces. Engagement responds systematically to information load and descriptive norms, and sensitivity to popularity cues varies across contexts, indicating conditionality rather than rigid prompt compliance. We discuss methodological implications for simulation-based communication research, including multi-condition stress tests, explicit no-norm baselines because default prompts are not blank controls, and design choices that preserve endogenous feedback loops when studying bandwagon dynamics.

Tai-Quan Peng, Yuan Tian, Songsong Liang +2

Department of Communication, Michigan State University, USA · College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, China · School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, China

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationHuman Behavior SimulationLLM Agent EvaluationNormative Conformity in Language ModelsSocial Media Analysis
AskPDF
Mar 20, 2026

Can LLM Agents Simulate Dynamic Networks? A Case Study on Email Networks with Phishing Synthesis

While Large Language Model (LLM) multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a transformative approach to simulating human behavior in complex systems, it remains largely unexplored whether these simulations can replicate realistic structural and temporal dynamics from a dynamic network perspective. Our evaluation indicates that existing frameworks excel at generating plausible micro-level interactions but fail to capture the emergent, macroscopic topologies necessary for domains that rely on realistic network dynamics, such as modeling information propagation and cybersecurity threats. To bridge this gap, we introduce two easily integrable extensions to simulation frameworks to ensure they preserve macroscopic network fidelity: 1) augmenting LLM agents with data-driven event triggers to organically sustain long-horizon interactions, and 2) integrating Hawkes processes to accurately model temporal activation dynamics. Our approach allows LLM MAS to capture both plausible micro-level patterns and macroscopic topologies. We further demonstrate the utility of this framework in synthesizing realistic phishing campaigns within evolving communication networks. The study reveals how threats exploit structural vulnerabilities, highlighting the potential of our framework for developing next-generation defenses. Our code is available at https://github.com/Graph-COM/NSL.

Siqi Miao, Ziyang Chen, Yuhong Luo +4

Georgia Institute of Technology · University of Maryland, College Park · Rutgers University

Hawkes ProcessesLarge Language Model-Based Social SimulationMulti-Agent LLM Systems
AskPDF
Mar 20, 2026

PolicySim: An LLM-Based Agent Social Simulation Sandbox for Proactive Policy Optimization

Social platforms serve as central hubs for information exchange, where user behaviors and platform interventions jointly shape opinions. However, intervention policies like recommendation and content filtering, can unintentionally amplify echo chambers and polarization, posing significant societal risks. Proactively evaluating the impact of such policies is therefore crucial. Existing approaches primarily rely on reactive online A/B testing, where risks are identified only after deployment, making risk identification delayed and costly. LLM-based social simulations offer a promising pre-deployment alternative, but current methods fall short in realistically modeling platform interventions and incorporating feedback from the platform. Bridging these gaps is essential for building actionable frameworks to assess and optimize platform policies. To this end, we propose PolicySim, an LLM-based social simulation sandbox for the proactive assessment and optimization of intervention policies. PolicySim models the bidirectional dynamics between user behavior and platform interventions through two key components: (1) a user agent module refined via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO) to achieve platform-specific behavioral realism; and (2) an adaptive intervention module that employs a contextual bandit with message passing to capture dynamic network structures. Experiments show that PolicySim can accurately simulate platform ecosystems at both micro and macro levels and support effective intervention policy.

Renhong Huang, Ning Tang, Jiarong Xu +6

Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Fudan University, Shanghai, China · HKUST, Hong Kong, China +3

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationPolicy OptimizationUser SimulationSocial Media Analysis
AskPDF
Mar 19, 2026

RADIUS: Ranking, Distribution, and Significance - A Comprehensive Alignment Suite for Survey Simulation

Simulation of surveys using LLMs is emerging as a powerful application for generating human-like responses at scale. Prior work evaluates survey simulation using metrics borrowed from other domains, which are often ad hoc, fragmented, and non-standardized, leading to results that are difficult to compare. Moreover, existing metrics focus mainly on accuracy or distributional measures, overlooking the critical dimension of ranking alignment. In practice, a simulation can achieve high accuracy while still failing to capture the option most preferred by humans - a distinction that is critical in decision-making applications. We introduce RADIUS, a comprehensive two-dimensional alignment suite for survey simulation that captures: 1) RAnking alignment and 2) DIstribUtion alignment, each complemented by statistical Significance testing. RADIUS highlights the limitations of existing metrics, enables more meaningful evaluation of survey simulation, and provides an open-source implementation for reproducible and comparable assessment.

Weronika Łajewska, Paul Missault, George Davidson +1

Amazon Luxembourg, Luxembourg · Amazon Barcelona, Spain

Large Language Model-Based Social SimulationDistribution Matching
AskPDF
Mar 19, 2026

Book your room in the Turing Hotel! A symmetric and distributed Turing Test with multiple AIs and humans

In this paper, we report our experience with TuringHotel'', a novel extension of the Turing Test based on interactions within mixed communities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and human participants. The classical one-to-one interaction of the Turing Test is reinterpreted in a group setting, where both human and artificial agents engage in time-bounded discussions and, interestingly, are both judges and respondents. This community is instantiated in the novel platform UNaIVERSE (https://unaiverse.io), creating a World'' which defines the roles and interaction dynamics, facilitated by the platform's built-in programming tools. All communication occurs over an authenticated peer-to-peer network, ensuring that no third parties can access the exchange. The platform also provides a unified interface for humans, accessible via both mobile devices and laptops, that was a key component of the experience in this paper. Results of our experimentation involving 17 human participants and 19 LLMs revealed that current models are still sometimes confused as humans. Interestingly, there are several unexpected mistakes, suggesting that human fingerprints are still identifiable but not fully unambiguous, despite the high-quality language skills of artificial participants. We argue that this is the first experiment conducted in such a distributed setting, and that similar initiatives could be of national interest to support ongoing experiments and competitions aimed at monitoring the evolution of large language models over time.

Christian Di Maio, Tommaso Guidi, Luigi Quarantiello +4

DIISM, University of Siena, Italy · Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy · LUISS University, Rome, Italy

LLM EvaluationHuman-AI InteractionMulti-Agent LLMsLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation
AskPDF