Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

On the limits of agency in agent-based models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2409.10568 v3 pith:OHPT2IY5 submitted 2024-09-14 cs.MA cs.AI

classification cs.MAcs.AI
keywords agentsagentabmsadaptivearchetypescomputationallarge-scaleagent-based
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

Agent-based modeling (ABM) offers powerful insights into complex systems, but its practical utility has been limited by computational constraints and simplistic agent behaviors, especially when simulating large populations. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) could enhance ABMs with adaptive agents, but their integration into large-scale simulations remains challenging. This work introduces a novel methodology that bridges this gap by efficiently integrating LLMs into ABMs, enabling the simulation of millions of adaptive agents. We present LLM archetypes, a technique that balances behavioral complexity with computational efficiency, allowing for nuanced agent behavior in large-scale simulations. Our analysis explores the crucial trade-off between simulation scale and individual agent expressiveness, comparing different agent architectures ranging from simple heuristic-based agents to fully adaptive LLM-powered agents. We demonstrate the real-world applicability of our approach through a case study of the COVID-19 pandemic, simulating 8.4 million agents representing New York City and capturing the intricate interplay between health behaviors and economic outcomes. Our method significantly enhances ABM capabilities for predictive and counterfactual analyses, addressing limitations of historical data in policy design. By implementing these advances in an open-source framework, we facilitate the adoption of LLM archetypes across diverse ABM applications. Our results show that LLM archetypes can markedly improve the realism and utility of large-scale ABMs while maintaining computational feasibility, opening new avenues for modeling complex societal challenges and informing data-driven policy decisions.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Mobility-Aware Cache Framework for Scalable LLM-Based Human Mobility Simulation

    cs.AI 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A latent-space reasoning cache with a lightweight decoder cuts the cost of LLM-based human mobility simulation by roughly 40-90% while keeping trajectory quality comparable.

  2. LLM Economist: Large Population Models and Mechanism Design in Multi-Agent Generative Simulacra

    cs.MA 2025-07 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    The LLM Economist framework couples persona-conditioned worker agents with an in-context RL planner to search US-bracket tax schedules, yet its Saez benchmark is derived from the planner's own solution and its headlin...

  3. Modeling Earth-Scale Human-Like Societies with One Billion Agents

    cs.MA 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Light Society scales LLM-agent social simulations to one billion agents by substituting most LLM interactions with a distilled surrogate model.

  4. Long-term Measurements: Towards a Longitudinal Understanding of Human-AI Interactions

    cs.AI 2026-08 accept novelty 5.0 of 10

    The paper sets out a research agenda for NLP to measure how prolonged language-model use changes human behavior over long time horizons, replacing single-session safety evaluations with longitudinal tracking.

  5. RecoWorld: Building Simulated Environments for Agentic Recommender Systems

    cs.IR 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A design proposal, not a tested system: a dual-view simulation loop in which an LLM-simulated user issues reflective instructions when about to disengage, and an instruction-following recommender adapts to maximize si...

  6. Large Language Model Powered Intelligent Urban Agents: Concepts, Capabilities, and Applications

    cs.MA 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    The paper defines urban LLM agents, surveys their sensing, memory, reasoning, execution, and learning workflows, and organizes their applications across planning, transportation, environment, safety, and society.

Pith tools