[
    {
        "id": "osp-15217",
        "type": "article-journal",
        "title": "A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents",
        "author": [
            {
                "family": "Asaria",
                "given": "Ali"
            },
            {
                "family": "Gandhi",
                "given": "Deep"
            },
            {
                "family": "Salomone",
                "given": "Tony"
            }
        ],
        "URL": "https://omanscience.com/ar/articles/a-society-of-researchers-designing-institutions-for-populations-of-autonomous-research-agents",
        "language": "en",
        "issued": {
            "date-parts": [
                [
                    2026
                ]
            ]
        },
        "abstract": "Deployments of research agents are moving to populations of thousands that share one pool of compute, while most current systems organize one project at a time or leave the population unorganized. We argue that such a population will acquire an organization whether or not its designers provide one, so designers should provide it explicitly, and that the multi-agent systems community holds the tools to do so. We propose a society of agents, a population of persistent agents under explicit institutions, and develop it for science as a society of researchers built on six principles. Principal investigators compete for compute through requests for proposals, independent review, and grants; a human governor, the mayor, allocates resources and assigns no tasks. In a running society of ten thousand researchers, asked only to improve the pretraining of language models, one lab reported a way to reach the same quality with about 30% less compute, a result the labs that tested it do not yet agree on. We close with six open problems for the agents community."
    }
]