Position: Simulating Society Requires Simulating Thought

Simulating society with large language models (LLMs), we argue, requires more than generating plausible behavior -- it demands cognitively grounded reasoning that is structured, revisable, and traceable. LLM-based agents are increasingly used to emulate individual and group behavior -- primarily through prompting and supervised fine-tuning. Yet they often lack internal coherence, causal reasoning, and belief traceability -- making them unreliable for analyzing how people reason, deliberate, or respond to interventions. To address this, we present a conceptual modeling paradigm, Generative Minds (GenMinds), which draws from cognitive science to support structured belief representations in generative agents. To evaluate such agents, we introduce the RECAP (REconstructing CAusal Paths) framework, a benchmark designed to assess reasoning fidelity via causal traceability, demographic grounding, and intervention consistency. These contributions advance a broader shift: from surface-level mimicry to generative agents that simulate thought -- not just language -- for social simulations.

SliceOps: Explainable MLOps for Streamlined Automation-Native 6G Networks

Sixth-generation (6G) network slicing is the backbone of future communications systems. It inaugurates the era of extreme ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (xURLLC) and pervades the digitalization of the various vertical immersive use cases. Since 6G inherently underpins artificial intelligence (AI), we propose a systematic and standalone slice termed SliceOps that is natively embedded in the 6G architecture, which gathers and manages the whole AI lifecycle through monitoring, re-training, and deploying the machine learning (ML) models as a service for the 6G slices. By leveraging machine learning operations (MLOps) in conjunction with eXplainable AI (XAI), SliceOps strives to cope with the opaqueness of black-box AI using explanation-guided reinforcement learning (XRL) to fulfill transparency, trustworthiness, and interpretability in the network slicing ecosystem. This article starts by elaborating on the architectural and algorithmic aspects of SliceOps. Then, the deployed cloud-native SliceOps working is exemplified via a latency-aware resource allocation problem. The deep RL (DRL)-based SliceOps agents within slices provide AI services aiming to allocate optimal radio resources and impede service quality degradation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of SliceOps-driven slicing. The article discusses afterward the SliceOps challenges and limitations. Finally, the key open research directions corresponding to the proposed approach are identified.