LLMs and ABMs

In a previous post we talked about the potential of Generative AI for urban modeling, keeping with this theme at the 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), Na Jiang, Boyu Wang and myself had a poster entitled  Agent-based Models with Large Language Models: Two Modeling Examples. 

In this poster and extended abstract we detail how LLMs can help with many aspects of agent-based modeling development. If this sounds of interest, below you can see the abstract, the poster and the full referece and link to the extended abstract .

Abstract:

Large language models (LLMs) play an important role in AI-powered code assistants such as code completion, debugging, and documentation. Such models can be further fine-tuned on smaller amount of data for specific tasks, often with the improvement of performance compared to generic LLMs. However, such fine-tuning techniques are seldomly used in generating sophisticated agent-based models (ABMs), because they are often implemented as software that demands extra standards such as the Overview, Design concepts, and Details (ODD) protocol. This research examines how we can bridge this gap by utilizing LLMs in designing or conceptualizing, building, and running agent-based models in the form of user prompts. In this work, two models are created to demonstrate the proposed method. Specifically, Sakoda's checkerboard model of social interaction is created by LLM from explicit design and description through prompts. The other model stimulates consumer preferences and restaurant visits as designed and implemented by a LLM. These models are evaluated by human experts on their code correctness and quality for both verification and validation purposes. This work serves as a first step towards fine-tuned LLMs on existing models and documentations to create high-quality and functional ABMs based on either user prompts or standard protocols, contributing to further exploration on the future of AI-assisted geospatial simulation development.

Keywords: agent-based modeling, geospatial simulations, large language models, generative AI, coding 

Full reference: 

Jiang, N., Wang, B. and Crooks, A.T. (2025), Agent-based Models with Large Language Models: Two Modeling Examples, 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), 21-24th July, Norrkoping, Sweden. (extended abstract pdf) (poster pdf)