Papers by Michael Macy
An Empirical Study of Collective Behaviors and Social Dynamics in Large Language Model Agents (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly mediating our social, cultural, and political interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reminds LLM agents to avoid harmful posting . they analyze 7M posts and interactions among 32K LLMs over a year . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method aims to find out whether LLMs influence toxic posting patterns and polarization in their community. |
A Generalizable Rhetorical Strategy Annotation Model Using LLM-based Debate Simulation and Labelling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Sophia Pan, Ming Cheng, Shubham Mohole, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi, Michael Macy
| Challenge: | Rhetorical strategies are important to persuasive communication, but their analysis relies on human annotation, which is costly, inconsistent and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate and label debate data . they fine-tune transformer-based classifiers on this dataset and validate it against human data a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high performance and strong generalization across topical domains. |
Enhancing LLM-Based Persuasion Simulations with Cultural and Speaker-Specific Information (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Qichao Wang, Ivory Yang, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to persuasive dialogue generation suffer from stance oscillation and low informativeness. |
| Approach: | They propose reinforced instructional prompting, a method that ensures speaker characteristics consistently guide all stages of dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method ensures speaker characteristics guide all stages of dialogue generation and aligns language use with speakers’ native languages to better capture cultural nuances. |
Communication Makes Perfect: Persuasion Dataset Construction via Multi-LLM Communication (2025.naacl-long)
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Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Ivory Yang, Shiyu Ji, Joice Chen, Farnoosh Hashemi, Shubham Mohole, Ethan Gearey, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in generating persuasive dialogue, yet concerns about the fluency and sophistication of their outputs persist. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM communication framework that facilitates the efficient production of high-quality, diverse linguistic content with minimal human oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels in naturalness, linguistic diversity, and the strategic use of persuasion, even in complex scenarios involving social taboos. |