ODD+LLM: Specifying LLM-Agent Behavior for Reproducible Social Simulation

Computer Science > Multiagent Systems

[Submitted on 6 Nov 2026]

Title:ODD+LLM: Specifying LLM-Agent Behavior for Reproducible Social Simulation

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:The ODD protocol is the de facto standard for describing agent-based models, but it lacks vocabulary for the components that determine LLM-agent behavior: prompt assembly, memory serialization, parsing, and retry logic. We propose ODD+LLM, a backward-compatible extension adding five documentation blocks grounded in the CoALA cognitive-architecture framework. To show that the gap matters, we conduct a multiverse analysis [Steegen et al., 2016] of a published LLM naming-game simulation, varying six specification choices a reimplementer must make. Variants that are defensible readings of the paper stay within statistical noise of our baseline reconstruction. Missing one instruction that the paper states but is easy to overlook (that the model answers as an outside observer rather than as a player) raises the share of runs settling on the convention agents individually favor from 0.35 to 1.00 and makes convergence three times faster, in a reimplementation that uses a different model from the original. We complement the demonstration with a reconstruction-sufficiency review of 28 published LLM-agent simulations, finding that the details of how prompts are built and how model outputs are parsed are undetermined in 77% of cases, and that no paper fully specifies its main LLM call. ODD+LLM gives the field a standard home for information it already produces but currently scatters across code repositories, supplementary files, and undocumented defaults.

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