S$^2$-MAS: A Society-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation Framework with 500 Million Household Persona Agents

arXiv:2610.27746v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Simulating economic responses at society scale requires agents whose decisions reflect household circumstances and the effects of earlier actions. We introduce S$^2$-MAS, a society-scale multi-agent simulation framework built on 500 million synthetic household personas grounded in real-survey data. Its Genese engine separates decisions from state updates, while reusable financial scenarios and application ledgers track consumption, cash, debt and payments. Trained with SFT + RLCD on 2.93 million examples, sharp-421m-mlx achieves 74.55% accuracy and 38.37% question-macro F1 on one-shot consumer financial-choice tasks derived from held-out survey responses. Its accuracy exceeds GLM-5.3-Flash, Jev 1.13, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, GPT-6-Luna and GPT-6-Astra in the common benchmark (full test for the first four; matched 500-group sample for Astra). We evaluate eight financial task families and simulate 12 million distinct household agents in paired purchase-funding conditions. Jointly raising purchase goals and approved credit limits increases consumption, with responses differing across age and income groups. Education, employment and household-size differences persist after age-income standardization and mainly reflect transitions from deferral to purchase. Asset and debt groups differ in cash drawdown, repayment and closing debt. A response-stratified 24-month panel varies purchase goals under a common credit product, with repayment and arrears updating subsequent offers. S$^2$-MAS links heterogeneous household decisions to evolving consumption, cash and repayment paths, supporting economic experiments across household groups, population scales and time horizons.