mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

The SocialAI School: Insights from Developmental Psychology Towards Artificial Socio-Cultural Agents

arXiv 2307.07871 ↗First posted 15 Jul 2023cs.AI cs.LGcited by 24

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

Developmental psychologists have long-established the importance of socio-cognitive abilities in human intelligence. These abilities enable us to enter, participate and benefit from human culture. AI research on social interactive agents mostly concerns the emergence of culture in a multi-agent setting (often without a strong grounding in developmental psychology). We argue that AI research should be informed by psychology and study socio-cognitive abilities enabling to enter a culture too. We discuss the theories of Michael Tomasello and Jerome Bruner to introduce some of their concepts to AI and outline key concepts and socio-cognitive abilities. We present The SocialAI school - a tool including a customizable parameterized uite of procedurally generated environments, which simplifies conducting experiments regarding those concepts. We show examples of such experiments with RL agents and Large Language Models. The main motivation of this work is to engage the AI community around the problem of social intelligence informed by developmental psychology, and to provide a tool to simplify first steps in this direction. Refer to the project website for code and additional information: https://sites.google.com/view/socialai-school.

Key facts. Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 38 of its 101 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2023.

Builds on

38 of 101 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2022Language Models as Agent Models3 Dec
  2. 2022A Generalist Agent12 May

Other references · 36

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  5. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,502
  6. 2015Continuous control with deep reinforcement learningcited by 3,290
  7. 2017FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layercited by 2,306
  8. 2022BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Modelcited by 1,978
  9. 2021Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modelingcited by 1,531
  10. 2017Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Predictioncited by 1,180
  11. 2017Hindsight Experience Replaycited by 1,104
  12. 2022Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agentscited by 1,032
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  1. 2018Exploration by Random Network Distillationcited by 971
  2. 2023Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 746
  3. 2016Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Motivationcited by 632
  4. 2017Overcoming Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrationscited by 325
  5. 2019Emergent Tool Use From Multi-Agent Autocurriculacited by 310
  6. 2016#Exploration: A Study of Count-Based Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 307
  7. 2018BabyAI: A Platform to Study the Sample Efficiency of Grounded Language Learningcited by 239
  8. 2018Machine Theory of Mindcited by 222
  9. 2022Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMscited by 220
  10. 2023Grounding Large Language Models in Interactive Environments with Online Reinforcement Learningcited by 194
  11. 2022Evolving Curricula with Regret-Based Environment Designcited by 168
  12. 2020Automatic Curriculum Learning For Deep RL: A Short Surveycited by 143
  13. 2020RIDE: Rewarding Impact-Driven Exploration for Procedurally-Generated Environmentscited by 135
  14. 2018Episodic Curiosity through Reachabilitycited by 109
  15. 2022Do Large Language Models know what humans know?cited by 60
  16. 2015Gated Feedback Recurrent Neural Networkscited by 54
  17. 2020Emergent Social Learning via Multi-agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 44
  18. 2021AGENT: A Benchmark for Core Psychological Reasoningcited by 42
  19. 2021Creating Multimodal Interactive Agents with Imitation and Self-Supervised Learningcited by 40
  20. 2020BeBold: Exploration Beyond the Boundary of Explored Regionscited by 33
  21. 2021PHASE: PHysically-grounded Abstract Social Events for Machine Social Perceptioncited by 22
  22. 2022Using Natural Language and Program Abstractions to Instill Human Inductive Biases in Machinescited by 20
  23. 2022Learning Robust Real-Time Cultural Transmission without Human Datacited by 9
  24. 2021Joint Attention for Multi-Agent Coordination and Social Learningcited by 8

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Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 6; 2024: 9; 2025: 8; 2026: 1.

24 papers.

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By area:

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  2. 2024Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challengescited by 758
  3. 2023Large Language Models Empowered Agent-based Modeling and Simulation: A Survey and Perspectivescited by 255
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  5. 2024Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilizationcited by 47
  6. 2024Richelieu: Self-Evolving LLM-Based Agents for AI Diplomacycited by 36
  7. 2025Do Large Language Models Solve the Problems of Agent-Based Modeling? A Critical Review of Generative Social Simulationscited by 28
  8. 2024InterIntent: Investigating Social Intelligence of LLMs via Intention Understanding in an Interactive Game Contextcited by 25
  9. 2024Large Language Models for Manufacturingcited by 24
  10. 2024Advancing Social Intelligence in AI Agents: Technical Challenges and Open Questionscited by 22
  11. 2023StrategyLLM: Large Language Models as Strategy Generators, Executors, Optimizers, and Evaluators for Problem Solvingcited by 13
  12. 2023How Far Are LLMs from Believable AI? A Benchmark for Evaluating the Believability of Human Behavior Simulationcited by 11
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  2. 2025MASS: Muli-agent simulation scaling for portfolio constructioncited by 9
  3. 2023Towards a Psychological Generalist AI: A Survey of Current Applications of Large Language Models and Future Prospectscited by 8
  4. 2024TrendSim: Simulating Trending Topics in Social Media Under Poisoning Attacks with LLM-based Multi-agent Systemcited by 6
  5. 2025StoryBox: Collaborative Multi-Agent Simulation for Hybrid Bottom-Up Long-Form Story Generation Using Large Language Modelscited by 4
  6. 2025Context-aware LLM-based AI Agents for Human-centered Energy Management Systems in Smart Buildingscited by 4
  7. 2025Carbon and Silicon, Coexist or Compete? A Survey on Human-AI Interactions in Agent-based Modeling and Simulationcited by 3
  8. 2024LLM4DESIGN: An Automated Multi-Modal System for Architectural and Environmental Designcited by 1
  9. 2025Large Language Model-Based Agents for Automated Research Reproducibility: An Exploratory Study in Alzheimer's Diseasecited by 1
  10. 2025InvestAlign: Overcoming Data Scarcity in Aligning Large Language Models with Investor Decision-Making Processes under Herd Behaviorcited by 1
  11. 2025CompLex: Music Theory Lexicon Constructed by Autonomous Agents for Automatic Music Generationcited by 0
  12. 2026EconAI: Dynamic Persona Evolution and Memory-Aware Agents in Evolving Economic Environmentscited by 0

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