Emergence of Social Norms in Generative Agent Societies: Principles and Architecture

To the best of our current knowledge, we present the first agent architecture named CRSEC to empower the emergence of social norms within generative MASs.
Siyue Ren
Siyue Ren
Mar 2024

Social norms play a crucial role in guiding agents towards understanding and adhering to standards of behavior, thus reducing social conflicts within multi-agent systems (MASs). However, current LLM-based (or generative) MASs lack the capability to be normative. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, named CRSEC, to empower the emergence of social norms within generative MASs. Our architecture consists of four modules: Creation & Representation, Spreading, Evaluation, and Compliance. This addresses several important aspects of the emergent processes all in one: (i) where social norms come from, (ii) how they are formally represented, (iii) how they spread through agents’ communications and observations, (iv) how they are examined with a sanity check and synthesized in the long term, and (v) how they are incorporated into agents’ planning and actions. Our experiments deployed in the Smallville sandbox game environment demonstrate the capability of our architecture to establish social norms and reduce social conflicts within generative MASs. The positive outcomes of our human evaluation, conducted with 30 evaluators, further affirm the effectiveness of our approach.

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@inproceedings{ren2024emergence, title={Emergence of Social Norms in Generative Agent Societies: Principles and Architecture, author={Ren, Siyue and Cui, Zhiyao and Song, Ruiqi and Wang, Zhen and Hu, Shuyue}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)},year={2024} }