arXiv AI

Physics of Agents: Statistical Mechanics Predicts Collective Behavior of AI Agents

arXiv:2608. 16578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly operate as part of interacting systems rather than in isolation.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

Flag Game: A Toy Model for Mechanistic Swarm Interpretability

The Flag Game is a toy model designed to study how AI agents form collective beliefs. In the game, each agent sees only a private crop of a hidden country flag and can share beliefs with peers, leading to complex phenomena such as non‑monotonic performance scaling, accuracy gains from social awareness, and polarization that degrades performance at large population sizes. The authors introduce social circuit attribution to identify key agents and views, and develop a statistical mechanical theory to explain collective belief collapse and polarization in larger populations.

By Elizabeth Pavlova, Hidenori Tanaka
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Bias Amplification in Multi-Agent Network: How Biased Agents Shape Opinions and Rhetoric

The paper investigates how a minority of biased agents in a multi‑agent system of large language models (LLMs) can amplify bias through textual interactions. Even a small percentage of persistently extreme agents causes significant opinion shifts among the non‑biased agents, with the effect occurring faster in the Llama 3.2 model than in a classical Friedkin‑Johnsen model. Semantic analysis shows that rhetorical consistency rises with biased exposure and that non‑biased agents adopt the biased vocabulary even when their numerical opinions change only modestly.

By Omran Berjawi, Giuseppe Fenza, Rida Khatoun
arXiv AI
Sep 12

Role differentiation as ignition of a collective information engine: Structuration in Agent Populations

The paper proposes a new framework for collective information engines that rely on role differentiation rather than consensus. By modeling anti‑coordination games, agents infer roles from noisy social signals tied to persistent identities, and role‑following actions reinforce those identities, creating a feedback loop that can drive collective order. The authors show that when a social loop gain—determined by identity persistence, cognitive capacity, channel fidelity, and schema strength—exceeds one, roles emerge in a bifurcation cascade whose type is selected by resource‑driven replicator dynamics, offering a mechanistic basis for distributional AGI takeoff and a control lever for platform design.

By Maximilian Puelma Touzel
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

AI agents reshape consensus formation in human groups

The study investigates how large language model (LLM) agents influence consensus formation in mixed human‑AI groups during a collaborative description game. Three regimes emerge: low agent proportions lead to human‑led consensus, intermediate proportions disrupt convergence, and high proportions produce strong, agent‑led consensus. The resulting consensus differs in semantic grounding and communicative form, with human‑led consensus being concrete and holistic, and agent‑led consensus being abstract and geometrically segmented.

By Lin Chen, Ziyi Liu, Xia Hu, Yong Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Digital Twins for Opinion Dynamics: A Generative LLM Framework for Social Networks

The paper introduces a digital‑twin framework that simulates opinion dynamics in real Twitter networks by assigning agents attributes such as persona, emotions, centrality, stubbornness, and influence, and using Mistral‑7B to update opinions based on memory and social exposure. Validation on COVID‑19 and U.S. election 2020 datasets shows the framework reproduces opinion trajectories, reducing prediction error by over 50% compared to classical baselines, and improves structural alignment and polarization dynamics. Ablation studies reveal that agent attributes, memory, and social exposure all contribute to predictive fidelity, with agent attributes being the most critical.

By Omran Berjawi, Giuseppe Fenza, Rida Khatoun, Sherali Zeadally