cs.AIJul 31, 2026

DungeonBench: A Benchmark for Rules-Rich Tactical Reasoning in Dungeons & Dragons Combat

Authors: Ismayil IsmayilovAtakan KaraKaan Oktay

Organizations: fal

Abstract

Games and simulators make valuable benchmarks by turning decisions into measurable outcomes, but many current suites under-test rules-rich tactical reasoning: the ability to choose well when geometry, timing, resources, objectives, and rule interactions all matter at once. We introduce DungeonBench, a benchmark for tactical reasoning in Dungeons & Dragons combat, built to cover the vast majority of combat-relevant 2014 System Reference Document content whose effects can be resolved by the simulator while retaining mechanics that simplified combat simulators often abstract away. At each step, DungeonBench exposes a complete tactical observation, a pending decision, and an indexed list of executable options spanning movement, attacks, spells, reactions, objectives, preparation, and scarce resources. The task is to value legal choices whose consequences depend on action economy, creature traits, battlefield geometry, timing windows, and future encounters. DungeonBench has two tracks: Encounter, which evaluates local tactical play in single fights, and Day, which links encounters through persistent hit points, spell slots, consumables, preparation, and short-rest timing, forcing policies to trade off immediate tactical advantage against future survivability. The same engine-generated decision stream supports heuristic controllers, language-model policies, learned option rankers, and masked-action reinforcement-learning agents. We evaluate frontier language-model policies on this shared decision stream. Results show that full tactical observations do not saturate the benchmark: frontier policies often win direct encounters, but linked encounter days expose failures in resource budgeting, rest timing, and rule-aware tactical discipline.

Explore similar work

Sep 17, 2026cs.CL

PetriBench: Benchmarking LLM Reasoning over Dynamic State Spaces

Characterizing LLM reasoning remains an open challenge, as many existing benchmarks isolate specific reasoning skills, rely on external knowledge, or are costly to extend. We introduce PetriBench, a compact, fully self-contained, and scalable benchmark for evaluating LLM reasoning over dynamic state spaces using Petri nets, a mature formalism for modeling real-world concurrent and distributed systems. PetriBench organizes reasoning into four task families varying by scope and temporal horizon, with Easy, Medium, and Hard levels generated by increasing structural complexity and evaluated against exact ground truth. Across a diverse set of proprietary and open-weight models, accuracy decreases consistently with difficulty, while harder instances expose increasingly distinct task-specific capability profiles. Additional analyses show that test-time compute improves performance but interacts differently with different reasoning tasks, and that procedural generation yields smooth scaling with structural complexity. Together, these results show that PetriBench provides a unified and extensible setting for probing the strengths, limits, and scaling behavior of LLM reasoning.
Pyrros Koussios, Benjamin Jäger, John Hua Yao +3
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

CordisBench: Can Language Models Reason About Component Lifecycles in Dynamic Agent Harnesses?

Dynamic agent harnesses let language models change the software that shapes their own execution. This flexibility brings a new reasoning burden: a local plugin change can propagate through dependencies and cleanup. We introduce CordisBench, a 1,200-question benchmark of this lifecycle reasoning. It combines a controlled formal setting with programs executed against Cordis, a runtime that manages component dependencies and cleanup, and asks models to identify affected components, predict state after a specified teardown order, determine which conditions hold under all or some orders, and choose reconfigurations that succeed when executed. Across these tasks, we evaluate three efficiency-oriented models at low reasoning effort with 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, or 32 relevant interactions, using deterministic task-specific scoring. Models usually handle small systems well but grow less reliable as more interactions become relevant, especially when predicting final state and when reasoning across teardown orders. Additional inference effort recovers marked gains for some models. The cost is nontrivial: on our 16-interaction subset, GPT-5.6 Luna uses nearly 3,000 reasoning tokens per question at medium effort. For these controlled instances, that cost is avoidable: an independent finite reference semantics agrees with Cordis execution on every observation and action outcome used for scoring across all 528 executable questions.
Damien Sileo, Dimitri Kachler
Jun 17, 2026cs.AI

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.
Jaeho Lee, Nick Merrill, Ezra Karger