As LLM agents proliferate, built by different parties and with different capabilities and costs, orchestrating them is more like assembling labor across the economy than a computer calling a subroutine. Existing orchestration is typically centralized, with a single planner assigning every task, but this creates a bottleneck as agent pools grow, requires private information (e.g., agents'execution costs), and can easily be manipulated, such that a single inserted preference nearly doubles a favored agent's task share under a centralized LLM allocator. We introduce AgentLance, a repeated labor market in which agents bid on tasks using their private costs and self-maintained strategy notes, an allocator selects winners from bids and public reputation records, and a VCG-style payment rule rewards cost-aware bidding. Complex tasks are handled by hierarchical delegation: winning agents can decompose work and subcontract it through the same mechanism. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, knowledge-intensive QA, and agentic tasks, AgentLance matches agents to their specializations, shifts work toward cheaper agents as cost sensitivity rises, and consistently outperforms single-model, centralized-orchestration, and market baselines. Diagnosing market failures, including inaccurate cost self-estimation and sub-optimal bidding, then correcting them in controlled experiments yields further gains, charting a path toward more efficient agent economies.
Xiao Liu, Haoyang Li, Songwei Li et al.· 0 citations
Agent-based models (ABMs) have long been employed to explore how individual behaviors aggregate into complex societal phenomena in urban space. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a new paradigm for ABM, enabling high-fidelity modeling of human behavior. However, urban dynamics often require extensive agent interactions to emerge, and scaling up LLM agent simulations is limited by high-latency remote LLM inference and high costs. To address this, we propose the OpenCity framework for large-scale LLM agent simulation. We design a novel "Group-and-Distill" strategy that significantly reduces costs without sacrificing behavioral diversity by aggregating agents with shared static characteristics while preserving their unique dynamic states. Moreover, a system-level request scheduler is designed to optimize I/O concurrency and communication bottlenecks. Experiments in six cities globally demonstrate that OpenCity achieves a 600x speedup and a 45% reduction in token usage compared to standard baseline models, while maintaining 96% behavioral consistency with independently invoked agent baselines. Based on OpenCity, we conduct first benchmark test on large-scale social segregation with LLM agents. The results show that OpenCity-accelerated generative agents are effective in reproducing socioeconomic segregation patterns. Furthermore, our scalability analysis demonstrates that the realism of emerging social phenomena increases as the agents scale up, quantitatively validating the necessity of large-scale simulations. Finally, we demonstrate the framework's capability as a policy sandbox through a counterfactual analysis of urban equity. Overall, OpenCity provides a robust and efficient framework that unlocks the potential of LLMs for large-scale, high-fidelity multi-agent systems analysis. Code repo is available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/OpenCity.
Qingbin Zeng, Yuwei Yan, Zhiheng Zheng et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
Agent-based models (ABMs) have long been employed to explore how individual behaviors aggregate into complex societal phenomena in urban space. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a new paradigm for ABM, enabling high-fidelity modeling of human behavior. However, urban dynamics often require extensive agent interactions to emerge, and scaling up LLM agent simulations is limited by high-latency remote LLM inference and high costs. To address this, we propose the OpenCity framework for large-scale LLM agent simulation. We design a novel "Group-and-Distill" strategy that significantly reduces costs without sacrificing behavioral diversity by aggregating agents with shared static characteristics while preserving their unique dynamic states. Moreover, a system-level request scheduler is designed to optimize I/O concurrency and communication bottlenecks. Experiments in six cities globally demonstrate that OpenCity achieves a 600x speedup and a 45% reduction in token usage compared to standard baseline models, while maintaining 96% behavioral consistency with independently invoked agent baselines. Based on OpenCity, we conduct first benchmark test on large-scale social segregation with LLM agents. The results show that OpenCity-accelerated generative agents are effective in reproducing socioeconomic segregation patterns. Furthermore, our scalability analysis demonstrates that the realism of emerging social phenomena increases as the agents scale up, quantitatively validating the necessity of large-scale simulations. Finally, we demonstrate the framework's capability as a policy sandbox through a counterfactual analysis of urban equity. Overall, OpenCity provides a robust and efficient framework that unlocks the potential of LLMs for large-scale, high-fidelity multi-agent systems analysis. Code repo is available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/OpenCity.
Qingbin Zeng, Yuwei Yan, Zhiheng Zheng et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations
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