The paper explores a runtime strategy-selection framework where a large language model (LLM) guides a pre‑trained reinforcement learning (RL) policy for non‑player characters (NPCs) in a Unity combat game without altering the underlying policy. Five NPC agents sharing a PPO policy were compared in a baseline setup and an LLM‑augmented setup, where a locally hosted Mistral 7B model assigns one of four tactical tags every five seconds based on live game state. Across 600 episodes against three scripted opponents, the LLM‑augmented agents more than doubled their win rate against a Balanced opponent, improved performance against an Evasive opponent, but struggled against an Aggressive opponent due to over‑reliance on encirclement; analysis of 2,430 strategy selections revealed limited zero‑shot differentiation with the model favoring Surround in 83.8% of cases.
By Hrithika Deepu Nair, Kayvan Karim
arXiv:2606. 18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with strategic reasoning, i.
By San Kim, Daechul Ahn, Reokyoung Kim, Hyeonbeom Choi, Seungyeon Jwa, Jonghyun Choi
arXiv:2606. 20014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies.
By Jannik H\"osch, Alessandro Sestini, Florian Fuchs, Amir Baghi, Joakim Bergdahl, Konrad Tollmar, Jean-Philippe Barrette-LaPierre, Linus Gissl\'en
arXiv:2608. 12626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Strategic reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) within long-horizon environments is often limited by inconsistent subgoals.
By Yi Wu, Zhimin Hu
StraTA introduces Strategic Trajectory Abstraction, a framework that samples a compact strategy from the initial task state and conditions subsequent actions on that strategy, training strategy generation and action execution jointly with a hierarchical GRPO-style rollout design. The method enhances exploration and credit assignment over long horizons by incorporating diverse strategy rollouts and critical self-judgment. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and SciWorld demonstrate that StraTA consistently improves sample efficiency and final performance, achieving success rates of 93.1% on ALFWorld, 84.2% on WebShop, and a 63.5% overall score on SciWorld, surpassing frontier closed‑source models.
By Xiangyuan Xue, Yifan Zhou, Zidong Wang, Shengji Tang, Philip Torr, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai, Zhenfei Yin
arXiv:2606. 00017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training language model agents for multi-agent strategic interaction presents a core difficulty: the quality of any action may depend on future events that never materialize, on moves that violate game rules, or on decisions made by other players.
By Aliaksei Korshuk, Alexander Buyantuev, Ilya Makarov
arXiv:2608. 07490v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly evaluated through games, but most benchmarks emphasize final outcomes rather than how players learn from repeated interaction.
By Yingying Guo, Zhuoxuan Ju, Ruibo Ming, Ruicheng Feng, Jinjin Gu
arXiv:2606. 30092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time strategy (RTS) games present significant AI challenges, characterized by expansive state-action spaces arising from multi-unit coordination in continuous battlefields, and sparse delayed rewards stemming from final win/lose signals.
By Chunhui Bai, Changhe Li, Dequan Li, Xinye Cai, Shengxiang Yang
arXiv:2607. 02255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory for a long-horizon LLM agent is a contract about what each future decision is allowed to see.
By Xiangchen Cheng, Yunwei Jiang, Jianwen Sun, Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Xiangcheng Cao, Yihao Liu, Fanrui Zhang, Li Jin, Kaipeng Zhang
arXiv:2609.16679v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Foundation models, alongside advances in learned game-world models, are reshaping AI across the game lifecycle. Beyond playing games, recent systems mo...
By Meng Luo, Yanlin Li, Hao Li, Hongzhan Lin, Pengfei Zhou, Tianjie Ju, Ran Zhang, Yeying Jin, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu
Agentick is a unified benchmark for sequential decision‑making agents that evaluates RL, LLM, VLM, hybrid, and human agents on 37 procedurally generated tasks across six capability categories, four difficulty levels, and five observation modalities via a single Gymnasium‑compatible interface. It includes a Coding API, oracle reference policies, pre‑built SFT datasets, a composable agent harness, and a live leaderboard. An evaluation of 27 configurations and over 90,000 episodes shows no single approach dominates, with GPT‑5 mini leading overall, PPO excelling in planning and multi‑agent tasks, and the reasoning harness boosting LLM performance by 3‑10×, while ASCII observations outperform natural language.
By Roger Creus Castanyer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Glen Berseth
arXiv:2606. 27483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capability in sequential decision-making, yet they remains fundamentally reactive in long-horizon tasks.
By Xuan Zhang, Zhijian Zhou, Lingfeng Qiao, Yulei Qin, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Xiaoyu Tan, Chao Qu, Yuan Qi