Integrating LLM and Diffusion-Based Agents for Social Simulation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) offer strong semantic reasoning capabilities for user modeling, but applying LLM-based simulation to an entire social network is computationally expensive and often unreliable for users with sparse behavioral histories. Meanwhile, conventional information diffusion models efficiently exploit historical propagation patterns and social structures, but provide limited understanding of item content and user-item semantic compatibility. We propose HySID, a hybrid framework for individual-level information adoption prediction that combines semantic reasoning with structural diffusion. HySID first analyzes the historical user-relation graph to adaptively select a small set of structurally informative core users. It then applies LLM-based simulation to estimate the engagement of these users and converts the judgments into a diffusion-compatible seed. Finally, a plug-in diffusion backbone propagates this seed through historical interaction structures to rank potential adopters across the full user population. This design enables LLMs to focus on users for whom semantic reasoning is most informative while allowing neural diffusion models to generalize the evidence to users that are not explicitly simulated. Experiments on three real-world datasets from Weibo, Zhihu, and KuaiRand show that HySID consistently improves four diffusion backbones in Recall and NDCG, while outperforming full-population LLM simulation baselines. At the same time, selective simulation reduces LLM inference cost by approximately 83\% to 99.9\%, demonstrating that HySID provides an effective and computationally practical approach to scalable information adoption prediction.