GENSTRAT is a system that evaluates strategic reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by procedurally generating two-player zero-sum imperfect-information betting games on demand. Each game is scored across five complexity axes—state space, temporal contingency, opponent dependence, private information, and precision—and assessed via Monte Carlo simulation. Using this generator, the authors created a 50-game benchmark, ran a tournament of twelve frontier and open-weight models with over 40,000 LLM vs. LLM matches, and found that the performance gap on the hardest games is 1.7 times larger than across all games, with higher thinking budgets, opponent strategy disclosure, and tailored reasoning improving outcomes.
arXiv:2608. 06741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning in large language models (LLMs) is often grounded in human text, human demonstrations, and human-generated rationales.
arXiv:2510. 10813v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to domains that require reasoning about other agents' behavior, such as negotiation, policy design, and market simulation.
arXiv:2610.18354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Game-theoretic benchmarks claim that large language model (LLM) strategic decision-making varies across game types, interaction structures, and capabil...
arXiv:2610.13995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training large language models (LLMs) on two-player zero-sum games provides a verifiable reward, and the gains have been shown to transfer to ge...
SpireBench evaluates long‑horizon strategic play by having large language models play the full commercial deck‑builder Slay the Spire, a game where early choices determine long‑term success. Across 20 LLMs at the highest difficulty, frontier models beat heuristic baselines and match average human performance but lag far behind experts, especially as runs lengthen. The benchmark reveals that strong models excel in early fights but misjudge risk over a run, and that their performance depends partly on prior game knowledge rather than on memories written during play.
Game Arena is an open, continuously expanding platform that evaluates large language models through competitive games, allowing head‑to‑head matchups in structured environments. Unlike static benchmarks, it prevents performance saturation by increasing gameplay difficulty as models improve. The report outlines the infrastructure and presents three pilot games—Chess, Poker, and Werewolf—covering perfect information, imperfect information, and multiplayer settings, and details evaluation metrics and competition results.
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit language‑specific skill differences by having two identical model instances play a text‑based game in different languages. Using a multilingual extension of TextArena, the authors evaluate three open‑weight models across eight languages and six games, finding that the same model can show markedly different performance—varying win–loss margins, invalid actions, and strategic choices—depending on the language interface. Analyses pinpoint language‑specific failures in spatial reasoning, card‑conditioned decisions, and optimal move selection, and demonstrate that adjusting the intermediate reasoning language can recover much of the lost performance.
arXiv:2606. 13815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Strategic reasoning under uncertainty underpins consequential decisions in negotiation, finance, and policy, but prevailing game-play benchmarks collapse heterogeneous reasoning dimensions into a single scalar, leaving the capability structure of frontier LLMs unexamined.
The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) struggle in strategic decision-making under incomplete information. It identifies two key gaps: an observation‑belief gap where LLMs’ internal representations of game states are accurate but brittle, and a belief‑action gap where converting these internal beliefs into actions is weak, leading to suboptimal payoffs. Experiments with Llama 3.1, Qwen3, and gpt‑oss confirm that acting optimally on decoded beliefs would improve outcomes in most games, highlighting a bottleneck in belief‑to‑action conversion.
Large language models access knowledge inconsistently across languages, but to what extent do they differ in their skill sets when interacting with different languages? This work quantifies cross-ling...
The paper presents an agent designed for the GLEE Competition that engages in bargaining, negotiation, and persuasion games against human and AI opponents. The agent combines a classical game‑theoretic solver, an online Bayesian layer for estimating opponent archetypes, and a language model for generating messages. Experiments include 13,200 Monte Carlo games against 11 synthetic archetypes, an ablation study of the opponent‑modeling layer, and an analysis of 9,337 live‑game messages showing a strong correlation between moral rhetoric framing and buyer purchase decisions.
arXiv:2608. 03420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models have improved substantially on single-shot reasoning tasks, but their performance in sequential decision-making is less well understood.