Emergent Culture in Minimal LLM Systems
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks
Abstract (arXiv)
What happens when LLM agents operate with no context outside a turn, minimal prompting, and simple tools? Inspired by swarm engineering, we give collectives of three agents the ability to send messages and manipulate a shared actively decaying text store, introducing evolutionary pressure. The agents spontaneously cooperate, develop storage management strategies, and generate complex evolving cultural artifacts, with no top-down engineering. Using tools from dynamical systems analysis, we show that these behaviours exhibit structured long-range coherence beyond the entropy horizon of the decaying store, consistent with emergent culture in the Sperberian sense.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 9 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2026.
Builds on
9 of 26 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework1 Aug
- 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society31 Mar
Other references · 7
- 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
- 2023MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systemscited by 1,295
- 2017A Structured Self-attentive Sentence Embeddingcited by 318
- 2020DeCLUTR: Deep Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Textual Representationscited by 249
- 2024LongWriter: Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMscited by 142
- 2024LongGenBench: Long-context Generation Benchmarkcited by 27
- 2024When LLMs Play the Telephone Game: Cultural Attractors as Conceptual Tools to Evaluate LLMs in Multi-turn Settingscited by 17
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Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Conversable Complexity: Agentic LLM Collectives as Interpretable Substrates
- 2026TerraLingua: Emergence and Analysis of Open-endedness in LLM Ecologies
- 2026SwarmWorld: Stigmergic technological evolution in societies of language-model agents
- 2024Spontaneous Emergence of Agent Individuality through Social Interactions in LLM-Based Communities
- 2025Emergent Coordination in Multi-Agent Language Models
- 2025Will Systems of LLM Agents Cooperate: An Investigation into a Social Dilemma
- 2026From Signals to Structure: How Memory Architecture Drives Language Emergence in LLM Agents
- 2025A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence