Sion Weatherhead
2026
SOCIA-EVO: Automated Simulator Construction via Dual-Anchored Bi-Level Optimization
Yuncheng Hua | Sion Weatherhead | Mehdi Jafari | Hao Xue | Flora D. Salim
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuncheng Hua | Sion Weatherhead | Mehdi Jafari | Hao Xue | Flora D. Salim
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Automated simulator construction requires distributional fidelity, distinguishing it from generic code generation. We identify two failure modes in long-horizon LLM agents: contextual drift and optimization instability arising from conflating structural and parametric errors. We propose SOCIA-EVO, a dual-anchored evolutionary framework. SOCIA-EVO introduces: (1) a static blueprint to enforce empirical constraints; (2) a bi-level optimization to decouple structural refinement from parameter calibration; and (3) a self-curating Strategy Playbook that manages remedial hypotheses via Bayesian-weighted retrieval. By falsifying ineffective strategies through execution feedback, SOCIA-EVO achieves robust convergence, generating simulators that are statistically consistent with observational data. SOCIA-EVO’s code and data are available here: https://github.com/cruiseresearchgroup/SOCIA/tree/evo.