Cited by 2,187Artificial Intelligence in GamesMulti-Agent Systems and NegotiationSpeech and dialogue systems

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 90 of the 91 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 11 of the 15 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

Open access
Park, Joon Sung, O'Brien, Joseph, Cai, Carrie Jun, Morris, Meredith Ringel, Liang, Percy, Bernstein, Michael S.·2023·Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

Abstract

Introduces generative agents that store experiences in natural language, synthesize reflections, and retrieve memories dynamically for planning and social behavior.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

The paper introduces generative agents powered by an LLM architecture with memory, reflection, and planning, instantiated as 25 characters in a Sims-like sandbox. In controlled and end-to-end evaluations, the full architecture produced more believable behavior than ablations and supported emergent social phenomena such as information spread, relationship formation, and party coordination.

Key findings

  • In a controlled believability ranking with 100 evaluators, the full architecture scored highest (TrueSkill mean 29.89, SD 0.72), ahead of no-reflection (26.88, 0.69), no-reflection/planning (25.64, 0.68), human crowdworker (22.95, 0.69), and fully ablated (21.21, 0.70); Kruskal-Wallis χ²(4)=150.29, p<0.001; all pairwise Dunn differences were significant at p<0.001 except crowdworker vs. fully ablated; Cohen’s d=8.16 versus the prior-work baseline.
  • Over two game days with 25 agents, knowledge of Sam’s mayoral run rose from 1 agent (4%) to 8 (32%), and knowledge of Isabella’s Valentine’s party rose from 1 (4%) to 13 (52%); none who claimed knowledge of this information had hallucinated it.
  • Relationship network density increased from 0.167 to 0.74; among 453 awareness responses, 1.3% (n=6) were hallucinated; five of twelve invited agents attended the Valentine’s party.
  • Common failures included retrieving wrong or incomplete memories, embellishing memories, and inheriting overly formal or overly cooperative language from the underlying model.

Methods

  • Architecture: an LLM (gpt3.5-turbo ChatGPT) augmented with a natural-language memory stream, retrieval scoring by recency (decay 0.995), importance (LLM-rated 1–10), and relevance (embedding cosine similarity), periodic reflection, and recursive planning/reacting/dialogue.
  • Controlled evaluation: within-subjects, 100 Prolific participants ranked believability of five conditions (full architecture, three ablations, human crowdworker) across five interview question categories; analysis used TrueSkill, Kruskal-Wallis, Dunn post-hoc with Holm-Bonferroni, plus inductive qualitative coding.
  • End-to-end evaluation: 25 agents in Smallville over two game days; measured information diffusion via interviews, relationship formation via mutual-knowledge network density, and coordination via party attendance.

Limitations

  • Stated: evaluation was short (two game days) and the human baseline was crowdworker-authored, not maximal human performance; simulation cost thousands of dollars in token credits and multiple days; robustness to prompt hacking, memory hacking, and hallucination is largely untested.
  • Stated: agents inherit underlying LLM imperfections, including potential bias/stereotypes and weaker believability for marginalized subpopulations due to limited data.
  • Evident from the text: agents showed erratic location choices, misapplied physical/social norms (e.g., one-person bathroom, after-hours stores), and instruction-tuning effects toward formality and excessive agreeableness; the environment was manually authored and not the focus.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3586183.3606763

Cites

90 of 91 references verified0 citation errors · 1 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

11 of 15 cited sources checked · 5 supported · 0 flagged · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 44 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 36
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 42
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 1
68 of 68
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Natural language interviews can validly assess an agent's knowledge and behavior, including its ability to stay in character, remember, plan, react, and reflect accurately.

    “In the technical evaluation, we leverage a methodological opportunity to evaluate an agent's knowledge and behavior by”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The language model can reliably produce coherent and contextually appropriate natural language for agent behavior.

    “Underlying this behavior is a novel agent architecture that combines a large language model with mechanisms for synthesizing and retrieving relevant information to condition the language model's output.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The retrieval and synthesis mechanisms are sufficient to maintain long-term coherence.

    “Because generative agents produce large streams of events and memories that must be retained, a core challenge of our architecture is to ensure that the most relevant pieces of the agent's memory are retrieved and synthesized when needed.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Human evaluators' believability rankings are a valid measure of behavioral believability.

    “Our dependent variable is the believability of the behavior, a central dependent variable in prior work on agents (e.g., [10]).”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The crowdworker-authored responses provide a meaningful human baseline for behavioral competency.

    “In addition to the ablation conditions, we added a condition with human crowdworker-authored behavior intended to provide a human baseline.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Human evaluators' rankings of believability provide a valid measure of the believability of agent behavior.

    “Our experiment produced 100 sets of rank data, where each participant ranked the fve conditions by believability.”
    “Our fndings suggest that the full architecture of generative agents generates the most believable behavior among all the conditions.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The five conditions adequately isolate the contributions of memory, planning, and reflection to believability.

    “Performance degraded with the removal of each component in the ablation conditions: the ablated architecture with no access to refection was the next best ( = 26.88;= 0.69), followed by no access to refection or planning ( = 25.64;= 0.68), and then the crowdworker condition ( = 22.95; = 0.69).”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The agents' memory streams accurately record the events and dialogues that ground their interview responses.

    “we verifed that the agents did not hallucinate their responses by locating the specifc dialogue in their memory stream that provided them with the information.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    A two-day simulation with 25 agents is sufficient to observe emergent social behaviors such as information diffusion, relationship formation, and coordination.

    “we allowed 25 agents to interact with each other continuously over two full game days in Smallville.”
    “We observed evidence of emergent outcomes across all three cases.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The crowdworker condition is a meaningful baseline for human believability.

    “the crowdworker condition ( = 22.95; = 0.69).”
    “While the crowdworker condition provided a helpful comparison point, it did not represent the maximal human performance that could serve as the gold standard in terms of believability.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The sandbox game world is a valid testbed for simulating human behavior.

    “We then demonstrate the potential of generative agents by manifesting them as non-player characters in a Sims-style game world and simulating their lives within it.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    For agents to coordinate, they must hear about an event and decide to attend by planning to arrive at the correct time and place.

    “To coordinate their behavior, agents need to hear about the event and choose to act on it by planning to show up at the right time and location.”
12 of 12

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • John's wake-up time differs between the text and figure caption

    Minor

    The account of John Lin's morning says he wakes at 7 a.m., while the caption for the same morning says he wakes around 6 a.m.

  • The party scenario is described as having both one and two user-set premises

    Minor

    The paper attributes the party scenario to a single user-generated seed, but its detailed account says the user also set Maria's crush on Klaus. That second premise bears directly on the reported date invitation.

2 of 2

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 70 references

Research works printed but not linked: 19

  1. John R. Anderson. 1993. Rules of the Mind. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ.
  2. Ruth Aylett. 1999. Narrative in virtual environments—towards emergent narrative. In Narrative Intelligence: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium (Technical Report FS-99-01). AAAI Press 83–86.
  3. 10.5555/7900.16137 · DOI
  4. Kevin Dill and L Martin. 2011. A Game AI Approach to Autonomous Control of Virtual Characters. In Proceedings of the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC’11). Orlando, FL, USA.
  5. Arpad E Elo. 1967. The Proposed USCF Rating System, Its Development, Theory, and Applications. Chess Life XXII, 8 (August 1967), 242–247.
  6. Rebecca Fiebrink and Perry R Cook. 2010. The Wekinator: a system for real-time, interactive machine learning in music. In Proceedings of The Eleventh International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2010)(Utrecht), Vol. 3. Citeseer, 2–1.
  7. Uwe Flick. 2009. An Introduction to Qualitative Research. SAGE.
  8. 10.1609/aimag.v22i2.1558 · DOI
  9. John E. Laird. 2000. It Knows What You’re Going To Do: Adding Anticipation to a QUAKEBOT. In Papers from the AAAI 2000 Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment(Technical Report SS-00-02). AAAI Press 41–50.
  10. Josh McCoy, Michael Mateas, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. 2009. Comme il Faut: A System for Simulating Social Games Between Autonomous Characters. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Digital Arts and Culture. 87–94.
  11. Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. 1970. Draft of a proposal to ARPA for research on artificial intelligence at MIT, 1970–71.
  12. 10.1109/SNPD.2017.8023884 · DOI
  13. Kyle Orland. 2021. So what is ’the metaverse’, exactly?Ars Technica (7 November 2021). arxiv:2111.04169https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/11/so-what-is-the-metaverse-exactly/
  14. Richard W. Pew and Ann S. Mavor (Eds.). 1998. Modeling Human and Organizational Behavior: Applications to Military Simulations. National Academy Press Washington D.C.
  15. Prolific. 2022. Prolific: Quickly Find Research Participants You Can Trust. https://www.prolific.co/
  16. Mark O. Riedl. 2012. Interactive narrative: A novel application of artificial intelligence for computer games. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’12). 2160–2165.
  17. Ho Chit Siu, Jaime Peña, Edenna Chen, Yutai Zhou, Victor Lopez, Kyle Palko, Kimberlee Chang, and Ross Allen. 2021. Evaluation of Human-AI Teams for Learned and Rule-Based Agents in Hanabi. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, M. Ranzato, A. Beygelzimer, Y. Dauphin, P.S. Liang, and J. Wortman Vaughan (Eds.). Vol. 34. Curran Associates, Inc., 16183–16195. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/86e8f7ab32cfd12577bc2619bc635690-Paper.pdf
  18. Graham Upton and Ian Cook. 2006. A Dictionary of Statistics (2 ed.). Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom.
  19. Robert Zubek. 2002. Towards implementation of social interaction. In AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment. AAAI Press. https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Spring/2002/SS-02-01/SS02-01-003.pdf

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Metadata

Authors
Park, J. S., O'Brien, J., Cai, C. J., Morris, M. R., Liang, P., & Bernstein, M. S.
Affiliations
  • Stanford University (US)
  • Google (United States) (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Publisher
ACM
Published
2023-10-29
Pages
1-22
OpenAlex
W4387835442
Cited by
2,187
References
70
Citations by year
2026: 961 · 2025: 745 · 2024: 380 · 2023: 101
FWCI
386.60
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Microsoft Research
  • Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
  • Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Artificial Intelligence in Games
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech and dialogue systems
Keywords
generative AI agents, large language models, interactive simulation environment, natural language interaction, agent planning, interpersonal communication

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