Agents & Tool Use · 2023

Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior

Joon Sung Park, Joseph C. O'Brien, Carrie J. Cai, Meredith Ringel Morris, Percy Liang, Michael S. Bernstein

Introduced an architecture for believable agents that store experiences in natural language, synthesize memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior.

Editorial record

Plain-language summary

Generative agents combine large language models with a memory stream architecture that records experiences, retrieves relevant memories by recency/importance/relevance, reflects to form generalizations, and plans actions recursively. A society of 25 agents in a Sims-like sandbox successfully coordinated complex social behaviors like spreading party invitations and forming relationships, all from a single seed suggestion. This work demonstrated how memory, reflection, and planning enable agents to maintain coherent long-term behavior beyond a single context window.

Source record

Provenance

Record ID
P-662
Record created
2026-08-12
Last reviewed
2026-08-12
Record version
1

Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.