Research Intern: Social Simulation Using LLM Agents

Research Intern:
Social Simulation Using LLM Agents – Honda Research Institute USA

Job Number: P25IN
T-46

San Jose, CA

Honda Research Institute USA (HRI-US) is seeking a research intern to develop next-generation social simulation methods using large language model (LLM) agents. The goal of this project is to build computational frameworks that simulate human social behavior at scale, enabling the study of interaction dynamics such as coordination, cooperation, persuasion, norm formation, and collective decision-making. The intern will design and evaluate LLM-based agent societies grounded in social science theory and empirical data.

This work will combine agent-based modeling, machine learning, and human-centered evaluation to investigate when LLM agents can serve as useful proxies for human behavior, and where they fail. The expected outcome is a research contribution suitable for submission to top-tier venues in AI, HCI, or computational social science, with impact on both human‑AI systems and social simulation research.

• Develop LLM-agent simulation environments for modeling social interaction and collective behavior.
• Design agent architectures, prompting strategies, memory mechanisms, and interaction protocols for multi-agent social settings.
• Incorporate behavioral theory and social science constructs into simulation design, such as cooperation, social influence, role dynamics, or norm emergence.
• Build evaluation pipelines to assess realism, robustness, and mechanism plausibility of simulated behavior against human data or established theory.
• Analyze emergent behaviors in simulated populations under different social, environmental, or policy conditions.
• Conduct experiments and ablation studies on agent behavior, interaction dynamics, and simulation validity.
• Document findings in the form of technical reports, research prototypes, and publication-ready materials.

• Current PhD student in Computer Science, Computational Social Science, Cognitive Science, HCI, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Experience with large language models, NLP, machine learning, or agent-based modeling.
• Solid background in experimental design, model evaluation, and data analysis.
• Familiarity with one or more of the following: multi-agent systems, social simulation, computational modeling of human behavior, or human-AI interaction.

• Prior research experience with LLM agents, generative social simulation, or agent-based modeling.
• Background in computational social science, behavioral modeling, or social science theory.
• Experience evaluating AI systems against human behavioral data, qualitative studies, or controlled experiments.
• Familiarity with prompting, tool use, memory, planning, or coordination in LLM-based agents.
• Publication record in relevant venues such as CHI, CSCW, ICWSM, FAccT, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or ACL/EMNLP.
• Interest in building simulation platforms that support hypothesis generation, intervention testing, or human-AI system design.

Years of Work Experience

Required:

0

Desired

Start Date:

9/14/2026

Internship Duration: 3 Months

Position