arXiv AI
Oct 9

Can AI Agents Learn Their Way to the Top? Evaluating Heuristic Learning in a Long-Running Game Agent Competition

The paper introduces Adversarial Heuristic Learning (AHL), a framework that uses AI agents to refine game policies without changing model weights. It presents AAArena, a benchmark of 12 adversarial games and 1,920 human programs, where agents analyze replays, select opponents, and revise policies to maximize ranking within limited budgets. Experiments show that certain configurations achieve gold medals, while performance drops in games with complex rules, highlighting challenges in game understanding and long‑horizon policy development.

By Kaisen Yang, Qingle Liu, Kejin Wang, Yicheng Zhao, Jieming Li, Shenghan Zheng, Ruize Yang, Bojun Yang, Heng Gong, Xiang Gao, Lanyue Zhang, Kaiyu Zhong, Zhuo Liu, Shaoxuan Li, Chengxi Li, Yong Yan, Weixuan Zhang, Tianwei Luo, Situ Wang, Youjie Zheng, Sihan Zhao, Shengyuan Wang, Huan-ang Gao, Jiazheng Xu, Xiaohui Xie, Wentao Han, Hongning Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 7

SpeedrunBench: Challenging LLM Agents with Video Game Speedrunning

SpeedrunBench is a new benchmark that tests large language model agents on their ability to develop and refine strategies for completing nine different video games as quickly as possible. The benchmark requires agents to repeatedly improve, reflect, and reason over long action horizons to beat both themselves and other players. Experiments show that while agents can approach human records on simple platformers, they lag behind humans on longer, more complex games within realistic resource limits.

By Yoshinari Fujinuma, Keisuke Kamahori, Ryuto Koike, Abdelrahman Madkour, Varun Prashant Gangal, Monty Bichouna, Martyna Markiewicz, Shivani Jain, Duncan Curtis, Rebecca Qian, Anand Kannappan