# GenSim: A General Social Simulation Platform with Large Language Model based Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04360 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04360/

## Key facts

- Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for language agents, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 13 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for language agents](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-language-agents/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Social simulation and multi-agent debate](https://mlsanity.com/agents/social-simulation-and-multi-agent-debate/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04024/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Empowered Agent-based Modeling and Simulation: A Survey and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11970/) (2023)
- [Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02957/) (2024)
- [EconAgent: Large Language Model-Empowered Agents for Simulating Macroeconomic Activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10436/) (2023)
- [War and Peace (WarAgent): Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Simulation of World Wars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17227/) (2023)
- [User Behavior Simulation with Large Language Model based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02552/) (2023)
- [Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05020/) (2024)
- [Money Walks: A Human-Centric Study on the Economics of Personal Mobile Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.0566/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [AgentSociety: Large-Scale Simulation of LLM-Driven Generative Agents Advances Understanding of Human Behaviors and Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08691/) (2025)
- [Understanding World or Predicting Future? A Comprehensive Survey of World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14499/) (2024)
- [Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01990/) (2025)
- [RecoWorld: Building Simulated Environments for Agentic Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10397/) (2025)
- [Can A Society of Generative Agents Simulate Human Behavior and Inform Public Health Policy? A Case Study on Vaccine Hesitancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09639/) (2025)
- [The PIMMUR Principles: Ensuring Validity in Collective Behavior of LLM Societies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18052/) (2025)
- [MF-LLM: Simulating Population Decision Dynamics via a Mean-Field Large Language Model Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21582/) (2025)
- [LLM-Based Social Simulations Require a Boundary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19806/) (2025)
- [YuLan-OneSim: Towards the Next Generation of Social Simulator with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07581/) (2025)
- [MapAgent: Trajectory-Constructed Memory-Augmented Planning for Mobile Task Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21953/) (2025)
- [Beyond Static Responses: Multi-Agent LLM Systems as a New Paradigm for Social Science Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01839/) (2025)
- [From the Fluency Fallacy to the Micro-to-Macro Validity Gap: Opportunities and Pitfalls of LLMs in Social Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19364/) (2025)
- [Characterizing LLM-driven Social Network: The Chirper.ai Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10286/) (2025)
- [Modeling Earth-Scale Human-Like Societies with One Billion Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12078/) (2025)
- [Chinese Court Simulation with LLM-Based Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17322/) (2025)
- [Simulation of Language Evolution under Regulated Social Media Platforms: A Synergistic Approach of Large Language Models and Genetic Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19193/) (2025)
- [CORE: Measuring Multi-Agent LLM Interaction Quality under Game-Theoretic Pressures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11915/) (2025)
- [Simulating Influence Dynamics with LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08709/) (2025)
- [Solving the Granularity Mismatch: Hierarchical Preference Learning for Long-Horizon LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03253/) (2025)
- [Implicit Turn-Wise Policy Optimization for Proactive User-LLM Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23550/) (2026)
- [When Disagreements Elicit Robustness: Investigating Self-Repair Capabilities under LLM Multi-Agent Disagreements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15153/) (2025)
- [GGBond: Growing Graph-Based AI-Agent Society for Socially-Aware Recommender Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21154/) (2025)
- [Simulating and Experimenting with Social Media Mobilization Using LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26494/) (2025)
- [DynamiX: Large-Scale Dynamic Social Network Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19929/) (2025)
- [Computational Multi-Agents Society Experiments: Social Modeling Framework Based on Generative Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17366/) (2025)
- [What Makes LLM Agent Simulations Useful for Policy Practice? An Iterative Design Study in Emergency Preparedness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21868/) (2025)
- [The Emergence of Altruism in Large-Language-Model Agents Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22537/) (2025)
- [Prompt and Parameter Co-Optimization for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24245/) (2025)
- [SimCity: Multi-Agent Urban Development Simulation with Rich Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01297/) (2025)
- [Empowering Real-World: A Survey on the Technology, Practice, and Evaluation of LLM-driven Industry Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17491/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), recent years have witnessed many promising studies on leveraging LLM-based agents to simulate human social behavior. While prior work has demonstrated significant potential across various domains, much of it has focused on specific scenarios involving a limited number of agents and has lacked the ability to adapt when errors occur during simulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel LLM-agent-based simulation platform called textitGenSim, which: (1) Abstracts a set of general functions to simplify the simulation of customized social scenarios; (2) Supports one hundred thousand agents to better simulate large-scale populations in real-world contexts; (3) Incorporates error-correction mechanisms to ensure more reliable and long-term simulations. To evaluate our platform, we assess both the efficiency of large-scale agent simulations and the effectiveness of the error-correction mechanisms. To our knowledge, GenSim represents an initial step toward a general, large-scale, and correctable social simulation platform based on LLM agents, promising to further advance the field of social science.