OASIS | Open Agents Social Interaction Simulations on One Million Agents

OASIS: Open Agents Social Interaction Simulations on One Million Agents

1Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; 2Dalian University of Technology; 3Oxford; 4KAUST; 5Fudan University; 6Xi'an Jiaotong University; 7Imperial College London; 8Max Planck Institute; 9The University of Sydney; 10Individual Researcher;
First Co-Author with equal contribution. Authorship order is random.   ** Second Co-Author with equal contribution. Authorship order is random.   † Corresponding author  

About OASIS:

There has been a growing interest in enhancing rule-based agent-based models (ABMs) for social media platforms (i.e., X, Reddit) with more realistic large language model(LLM) agents, thereby allowing for a more nuanced study of complex systems. As a result, several LLM-based ABMs have been proposed in the past year. While they hold promise, each simulator is specifically designed to study a particular scenario, making it time-consuming and resource-intensive to explore other phenomena using the same ABM. Additionally, these models simulate only a limited number of agents, whereas real-world social media platforms involve millions of users. To this end, we propose OASIS, a generalizable and scalable social media simulator. OASIS is designed based on real-world social media platforms, incorporating dynamically updated environments(i.e., dynamic social networks and post information), diverse action spaces(i.e., following, commenting), and recommendation systems(i.e., interest-based and hot-score-based). Additionally, OASIS supports large-scale user simulations, capable of modeling up to one million users. With these features, OASIS can be easily extended to different social media platforms to study large-scale group phenomena and behaviors. We replicate various social phenomena, including information spreading, group polarization, and herd effects across X and Reddit platforms. Moreover, we provide observations of social phenomena at different agent group scales. we observe that the larger agent group scale leads to more enhanced group dynamics and more diverse and helpful agents' opinions. These findings demonstrate OASIS's potential as a powerful tool for studying complex systems in digital environments.

OASIS: An open-sourced, generalizable, and scalable social media simulator.


Overview of OASIS Architecture


Key Features of OASIS:
  • Generalizable: OASIS can be extended to various social media platforms, including X and Reddit.
  • Scalable: OASIS supports up to one million agents interacting simultaneously.
  • Realistic: OASIS is derived from real systems, featuring 21 actions, a recommendation system, and a dynamic environment.

Validate OASIS with Different Scenario

Information Propagation in X

Using real data, we replicated message propagation trends in OASIS, comparing them in terms of scale, depth, and maximum reach. The results show that OASIS's design effectively replicates real-world message propagation trends, providing a foundation for studying the evolution of more complex opinion spreading.

Group Polarization in X

We simulated a Twitter environment where 196 users discussed a classic social psychology issue. The results showed that, as interactions progressed, users' opinions tended to become more extreme. This trend of polarization was even more pronounced in the Uncensored model.

Herd Effect in Reddit

We simulated various scenarios on Reddit where posts were pre-upvoted or downvoted to mimic herd behavior among users. By comparing these simulations with human data, we observed that agents are more susceptible to herd behavior than humans—that is, they are more likely to follow others' opinions.

Can we uncover the effects of scaling up the number of agents?

More agents lead to more helpful opinions

In group polarization experiments, having more agent groups leads to more helpful and diverse viewpoints among the same agent groups.

More agents lead to more enhanced dynamic

We injected a significant number of counterfactual posts into the Reddit environment and analyzed the herd effect with varying numbers of agents. It was observed that the larger the number of agents, the clearer the behavioral trends of the entire group.

Simulating rumor propagation among a million agents

We created four pairs of rumors and truths, each pair sharing the same topic. We tracked the number of posts related to both rumors and truths over time, observing their trends. The results show that rumors have a greater impact on the group than the truths.