LLM‑BabyBench transforms the BabyAI gridworld into a fully observable, purely textual setting that isolates planning as the sole source of failure. By serialising the entire grid, providing formal instructions, and validating actions deterministically, the benchmark introduces the PPD suite—Predict, Plan, and Decompose tasks—each scored with metrics that separate mission understanding from sequencing. Across a range of large language models, simulation accuracy is high while planning success drops sharply beyond a model‑specific horizon, revealing that plan length—not grid size—drives failure and that models often commit to a single corridor‑shaped route without backtracking.
By Idriss Malek, Omar Choukrani, Daniil Orel, Anh Duy Le Dinh, Zhuohan Xie, Zangir Iklassov, Martin Tak\'a\v{c}, Salem Lahlou
WordPolo is a word‑finding task that evaluates language models by having them guess an unknown target word and receive semantic similarity feedback. Participants start with no knowledge, make iterative guesses, and receive distance scores that guide them through semantic space. The study tests recent LLMs, LRMs, humans, and a heuristic on 1,500 puzzles, revealing that while solve rates vary widely, many models make meaningful progress and exhibit human‑like strategies, highlighting the importance of assessing reasoning processes, not just final accuracy.
By Tyler McDonald, Ali Emami
G-ReAct is a reasoning framework that frames deep search as state evolution over a fixed-topology query graph, enabling explicit tracking of search progress and constraint preservation. It generates high-quality trajectories for fine-tuning and provides structured guidance during inference without extra fine-tuning. Experiments show that with only 1.9K generated trajectories, a Qwen3 model achieves strong accuracy on BrowseComp-ZH and XBench, outperforming larger open-source baselines, and consistently improves existing LLMs on deep-search tasks.
By Shaoxiong Yang, Mengyuan Zhang, Shaojun Lin, Chao Li, Wei Liu, Kun Shao, Jian Luan
The paper investigates how small language models (SLMs) perform in knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) when evaluated on the reasoning paths they take, rather than just the final answer. Using the THESEUS navigation and traceability framework, the authors test frozen, off‑the‑shelf SLMs as local action policies that choose graph actions and decide when to stop, without any task‑specific training or free‑form answer generation. By measuring both Hits@1 and Path Edit Distance (PED) across the Kinship and MQuAKE‑ST datasets, the study finds that models vary significantly in both answer accuracy and path fidelity, and that prompting can either help or hurt navigation depending on the model.
"whyItMatters":"The results show that evaluating SLMs solely on endpoint accuracy can be misleading, highlighting the need to assess reasoning path fidelity in KGQA tasks."
By Eduin E. Hernandez, Sergio A. Diaz, Luis F. Garcia, Nurassyl Askar, Stefano Rini
arXiv:2510. 09595v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Competitive programming problems are increasingly used to evaluate the coding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) due to their complexity and ease of verification.
By Kaijian Zou, Aaron Xiong, Yunxiang Zhang, Frederick Zhang, Yueqi Ren, Jirong Yang, Ayoung Lee, Shitanshu Bhushan, Lu Wang
arXiv:2606. 27806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models for language agents come in two useful forms.
By Xinyuan Song, Zekun Cai
arXiv:2607. 08894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promise in multi-step planning tasks, but existing approaches like LATS (Language Agent Tree Search) and ReAct rely heavily on LLM inference during planning, leading to high computational costs and stochastic behavior.
By Maureese Williams, Dymitr Nowicki
arXiv:2603.16654v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Evaluating the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) solely from final answers can obscure failures in intermediate steps, espe...
By Xiaojie Gu, Sherry T. Tong, Aosong Feng, Sophia Simeng Han, Jinghui Lu, Yingjian Chen, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Chanjun Park, Rex Ying, Irene Li
arXiv:2606. 06098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate proficiency on a wide range of general tasks, and achieve remarkable results on various specialized tasks via domain-expert LLMs.
By Eros Fan\`i, O\u{g}uzhan Ersoy
arXiv:2609.33149v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: A common principle of effective learning is to practice material that is neither already mastered nor too difficult to permit progress. We ask how...
By Hongbo Chen, Guohua Lu, Ting Dang, Hong Jia
GAVEL is a framework that uses an explicit graph world model to verify and repair long‑horizon plans generated by large language models (LLMs). The graph encodes object relations, action pre‑conditions and effects, and probabilistic beliefs about unobserved object locations, allowing the system to predict action outcomes, detect violations, and repair them before execution. In experiments on BEHAVIOR‑1K, GAVEL boosts single‑task success from 41.2 % to 91.8 % and multi‑task success from 19.9 % to 92.6 %, while also reducing travel distance by about 5.4 % compared with a static variant.
By Ruiyang Wang, Hao-Lun Hsu, Swarajh Mehta, Jiwoo Kim, Zhihao Dou, Miroslav Pajic
arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.
By Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Yuhui Xu, Doyen Sahoo, Christof Monz, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong