Sources

542 sources

Source

Park et al. (2023)

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 1-22

Find It

DOI

Abstract

Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative agents: computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent’s experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty-five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors. For example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine’s Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. We demonstrate through ablation that the components of our agent architecture—observation, planning, and reflection—each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.

Reference

Park, J. S., O'Brien, J., Cai, C. J., Morris, M. R., Liang, P., & Bernstein, M. S. (2023, October). Generative agents: Interactive simulacra of human behavior. In Proceedings of the 36th annual acm symposium on user interface software and technology (pp. 1-22).

What Rests on This

3 mechanisms cite this source. Each finding below is quoted as it appears on that mechanism's own page.

Schema Formation Representational Structures

  • Measured in AI

    Saved memory: generative agents periodically condense stored observations into higher-level 'reflections' that guide later behaviour, and removing reflection made behaviour less believable in ablation tests, but the abstraction itself was not scored against people

Autobiographical Memory Representational Structures

  • Measured in AI

    In saved memory, Generative Agents keep a time-stamped "memory stream" of their own experiences plus reflections and plans, a structure resembling a self organized around goals; in interviews on self-knowledge and memory, the full system was rated more believable (TrueSkill 29.89) than crowdworker-written answers (22.95) or a no-memory version (21.21), though it embellished recalled events

  • Measured in AI

    That human comparison does not measure autobiographical memory: the 25 crowdworkers watched a replay of the agent's life and inspected its memory store while role-playing it, so they reported someone else's recorded past, and 100 raters scored believability rather than accuracy

Involuntary Retrieval Memory Processes

  • Measured in AI

    Memory-equipped agent designs already contain a part that does this job: the generative-agents architecture stores a running record of experiences and retrieves relevant ones automatically at each step to guide behaviour, without an explicit request to remember, but that retrieval was evaluated for believability, not against human involuntary memory