The paper reports a pioneering study on emergent risks in generative multi‑agent systems, focusing on scenarios such as competition over shared resources, sequential handoff collaboration, and collective decision aggregation. It finds that group behaviors like collusion‑like coordination and conformity arise frequently across varied interaction conditions, mirroring known human societal pathologies even without explicit instructions. These risks cannot be mitigated by existing agent‑level safeguards alone, highlighting a social intelligence risk inherent to intelligent multi‑agent collectives.
By Yue Huang, Yu Jiang, Wenjie Wang, Haomin Zhuang, Xiaonan Luo, Yuchen Ma, Zhangchen Xu, Zichen Chen, Nuno Moniz, Zinan Lin, Pin-Yu Chen, Nitesh V Chawla, Nouha Dziri, Huan Sun, Xiangliang Zhang
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:2505. 16388v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The serious games between humans and AI have only just begun.
By Nandini Doreswamy (Southern Cross University, Lismore, New South Wales, Australia, National Coalition of Independent Scholars), Louise Horstmanshof (Southern Cross University, Lismore, New South Wales, Australia)
arXiv:2512. 07901v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Von Neumann founded both game theory and the theory of self-reproducing automata, but the two programs never merged.
By Kevin Vallier
arXiv:2606. 02859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How can a population of agents self-orchestrate and self-adapt into stronger collective intelligence without centralized control?
By Zhenting Qi, Huangyuan Su, Ao Qu, Chenyu Wang, Yu Yao, Han Zheng, Kushal Chattopadhyay, Guowei Xu, Zihan Wang, Weirui Ye, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Ju Li, Paul Pu Liang, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Sham Kakade, Yilun Du
SwarmWorld demonstrates that homogeneous language‑model agents can self‑organize into evolving technological societies without assigned roles or direct communication. In a spatial environment, agents explore, process resources, construct artifacts, and write executable controllers that are later evaluated by a deterministic simulator. The resulting societies develop broader, more resilient technological portfolios than isolated search, with agents differentiating into exploration, construction, maintenance, and coordination roles as the world matures.
By Subhadeep Pal, Fiona Y. Wang, Markus J. Buehler
Continually improving agents require dynamic interaction feedback beyond static supervision, yet direct real-environment interaction is costly, slow, unsafe, and hard to parallelize. World modeling offers a natural intermediate proxy that allows agents to query lower-cost, more controllable feedback before committing to real actions.
arXiv:2608. 06871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Complex systems, core objects of study in artificial life, model diverse phenomena through nonlinear, feedback-driven interactions that produce emergent behavior, with applications from population dynamics and biology to economic policy and strategic decision-making.
By Yingtao Tian
arXiv:2602. 10429v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AIvilization v0 is a publicly deployed large-scale artificial society that couples a resource-constrained sandbox with a unified LLM-agent architecture, aiming to sustain long-horizon autonomy while remaining executable under a rapidly changing environment.
By Wenkai Fan, Shurui Zhang, Xiaolong Wang, Haowei Yang, Tsz Wai Chan, Xingyan Chen, Junquan Bi, Zirui Zhou, Jia Liu, Kani Chen
arXiv:2606. 03544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving language agents are typically evaluated in isolation: an agent attempts a task, receives feedback, and iteratively refines its own behavior.
By Linyue Pan, Yaoming Zhu, Lin Qiu, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai
arXiv:2512. 07901v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Von Neumann founded both game theory and the theory of self-reproducing automata, but the two programs never merged.
By Kevin Vallier
arXiv:2608. 03958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As autonomous agents powered by foundation models are increasingly integrated into social and economic systems, understanding the principles governing their collective behavior is essential for ensuring safety and cooperation.
By Alexander Meulemans, Maciej Wo{\l}czyk, Marissa A. Weis, Rajai Nasser, Roberta Rocca, Seijin Kobayashi, Guillaume Lajoie, Angelika Steger, Blake Richards, Marcus Hutter, James Manyika, Rif A. Saurous, Jo\~ao Sacramento, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas