Learning to Make Friends: Coaching LLM Agents toward Emergent Social Ties

Can large language model (LLM) agents reproduce the complex social dynamics that characterize human online behavior -- shaped by homophily, reciprocity, and social validation -- and what memory and learning mechanisms enable such dynamics to emerge? We present a multi-agent LLM simulation framework in which agents repeatedly interact, evaluate one another, and adapt their behavior through in-context learning accelerated by a coaching signal. To model human social behavior, we design behavioral reward functions that capture core drivers of online engagement, including social interaction, information seeking, self-presentation, coordination, and emotional support. These rewards align agent objectives with empirically observed user motivations, enabling the study of how network structures and group formations emerge from individual decision-making. Our experiments show that coached LLM agents develop stable interaction patterns and form emergent social ties, yielding network structures that mirror properties of real online communities. By combining behavioral rewards with in-context adaptation, our framework establishes a principled testbed for investigating collective dynamics in LLM populations and reveals how artificial agents may approximate or diverge from human-like social behavior.

Behavioral Homophily in Social Media via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Reddit Case Study

Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily, plays a key role in the formation of echo chambers which further amplify polarization and division. Existing works examining homophily in online communities traditionally infer it using content- or adjacency-based approaches, such as constructing explicit interaction networks or performing topic analysis. These methods fall short for platforms where interaction networks cannot be easily constructed and fail to capture the complex nature of user interactions across the platform. This work introduces a novel approach for quantifying user homophily. We first use an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) framework to infer users' policies, then use these policies as a measure of behavioral homophily. We apply our method to Reddit, conducting a case study across 5.9 million interactions over six years, demonstrating how this approach uncovers distinct behavioral patterns and user roles that vary across different communities. We further validate our behavioral homophily measure against traditional content-based homophily, offering a powerful method for analyzing social media dynamics and their broader societal implications. We find, among others, that users can behave very similarly (high behavioral homophily) when discussing entirely different topics like soccer vs e-sports (low topical homophily), and that there is an entire class of users on Reddit whose purpose seems to be to disagree with others.