§ FrontierSynthetic people, societies & civilizations
The recent literature moving the frontier — organized along the three layers we model: from the individual to the society to the cognitive civilization that emerges between them.
§ Layer 01Synthetic person — personas & individuals
09"DeepPersona: A Generative Engine for Scaling Deep Synthetic Personas." Deep persona generation via a taxonomy of human attributes.2025
10"How Well Do LLMs Capture Human Personality?" On persona-manifold collapse in latent space.2026
11"The Need for a Socially-Grounded Persona Framework for User Simulation." Sociopsychological frameworks vs. isolated demographic attributes.2026
12"Eval4Sim: An Evaluation Framework for Persona Simulation." Adherence, consistency and naturalness against human corpora.2026
13"Beyond Cooperative Simulators: Realistic User Personas for Robust Evaluation." Evolutionary search with multi-objective fitness over personas.2026
14"Persona Vectors: Monitoring and Controlling Character Traits." Persona vectors in activation space.2025
§ Layer 02Synthetic society — emergent social simulation
15Park et al. "Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People." Replicas of real individuals validated against the General Social Survey.2024
16"SocioVerse." A social-simulation world model over a pool of 10M real users.2025
17"AgentSociety: Large-Scale Simulation of LLM-Driven Agents." Computational experiments on polarization, basic income and shocks.2025
18"HumanStudy-Bench: AI Agent Design for Participant Simulation." Reconstructs human-subject studies and measures behavioral agreement.2026
19"Don't Trust Generative Agents — Unless You Benchmarked their Empirical Realism." Empirical realism must be validated, not assumed.2025
20"From ChatGPT to DeepSeek: Can LLMs Simulate Humanity?" A critical examination of the limits of simulating human behavior.2025
§ Layer 03Cognitive civilization — open-ended co-evolution
21"Agentopia: Long-Term Life Simulation and Learning in Agent Societies." Agents develop social intelligence over simulated "years."2026
22"Static Sandboxes Are Inadequate: Open-Ended Co-Evolution in LLM Multi-Agent Simulations." Open-ended co-evolution vs. static sandboxes.2025
23"Cooperate or Collapse" (GovSim). Emergence of sustainable cooperation — or collapse — among agents.2024
§ BaseGrounding surveys
24"From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by LLM-based Agents." Covers the individual → society progression.2024