Lucas Bergholdt Hansen, Federico Torrielli, Filippo Tonini +1cs.MA cs.CL
LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent environments whose incentives can shape their behavior. We introduce The Energy Society, a minimal survival economy for studying how competitive and cooperative incentives affect emergent behavior when inference cost is directly tied to survival: Agents spend energy based on model size when generating tokens, regain energy by completing jobs or receiving donations, and deactivate if their energy reaches zero. We compare competitive and cooperative objectives against a baseline setting and several control variants. Across experiments, larger models consistently consume the most energy and spend more energy than they gain, even in those settings where token cost is not size-dependent. Cooperative incentives substantially alter behavior: agents donate to reactivate others, sometimes at the cost of their own survival, and job allocation changes. Ablations reveal that allowing agents to recommend actions to each other supports coordination and ambitious job selection, while memory helps agents calibrate risk from past outcomes. Agents rarely choose direct sabotage, but show more subtle signs of self-serving behavior in the competitive setting. The Energy Society is a compact testbed for studying the interaction between token costs and group incentives under a survival pressure. Source code is available at https://github.com/LucasBergholdt/EnergySociety
As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, traditional static evaluation fails to capture multi-step decision-making. We introduce AgenticAI-Supervisor, an API and UI-driven RL Gym environment that decouples environment creation from scalable execution. By moving to verifiable execution outcomes, the platform generates high-fidelity traces and applies multi-dimensional reward shaping. Critically, our framework mitigates reward hacking through rigorous internal state validation and testing. This work provides a first look at our platform's core capabilities through a Customer Support Agent case study demonstrating a consistent closed-loop feedback for model optimization. Future work will focus on advanced features such as Computer Use, Tool Use, automated "stumping", and edge-case generation.