Collective Opinion Dynamics in Structured LLM Populations
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2609.12444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulated societies of large language model agents are used to study online polarization, and separately to study collective intelligence, but the tw...
arXiv:2608. 16578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents increasingly operate as part of interacting systems rather than in isolation.
The paper introduces a controlled testbed to study how goal‑directed persuaders shift stances in networks of large language model agents, using real‑world ego‑network topologies. Experiments across four LLM backbones, five graph structures, and 55 policy statements show that persuasion dynamics depend on topology, competition, topic, and model prior. The study finds that direct exposure predicts stance change, peer relays have measurable influence, and that post‑text analysis alone misses important movement, highlighting the need to evaluate multi‑agent persuasion through trajectory‑level processes, belief probes, exposure provenance, and action logs.
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.
The paper reviews how large language models (LLMs) are being used to model social networks, highlighting their ability to represent users, relationships, and interactions through natural language. It categorizes existing work into network generative models—split into selection‑based and interaction‑based approaches—and dynamic process models, which cover opinion dynamics, information diffusion, and rumor propagation. The survey also discusses the advantages of LLMs for realistic, context‑aware social behavior, while noting limitations such as social biases and prompt sensitivity, and outlines open research challenges and future directions.
arXiv:2607. 03695v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in interacting populations, raising the question of what such populations come to believe collectively.