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.
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Cite this article
APA 7
Asaria, A., Gandhi, D., & Salomone, T. (2026). A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/a-society-of-researchers-designing-institutions-for-populations-of-autonomous-research-agents
MLA 9
Asaria, Ali, et al. "A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/a-society-of-researchers-designing-institutions-for-populations-of-autonomous-research-agents.
Chicago (author–date)
Asaria, Ali, Deep Gandhi, and Tony Salomone. 2026. "A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/a-society-of-researchers-designing-institutions-for-populations-of-autonomous-research-agents.
Harvard
Asaria, A., Gandhi, D. and Salomone, T. (2026) 'A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/a-society-of-researchers-designing-institutions-for-populations-of-autonomous-research-agents.
Vancouver
Asaria A, Gandhi D, Salomone T. A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/a-society-of-researchers-designing-institutions-for-populations-of-autonomous-research-agents
IEEE
A. Asaria, D. Gandhi, and T. Salomone, "A Society of Researchers: Designing Institutions for Populations of Autonomous Research Agents," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/a-society-of-researchers-designing-institutions-for-populations-of-autonomous-research-agents.