Porimon: An LLM-Based Pokémon Battle Agent Enhanced by Long/Short-Term Knowledge Augmented Generation

We present the PokeAgent Challenge, a large-scale benchmark for decision-making research built on Pokemon's multi-agent battle system and expansive role-playing game (RPG) environment. Partial observability, game-theoretic reasoning, and long-horizon planning remain open problems for frontier AI, yet few benchmarks stress all three simultaneously under realistic conditions. PokeAgent targets these limitations at scale through two complementary tracks: our Battling Track, which calls for strategic reasoning and generalization under partial observability in competitive Pokemon battles, and our Speedrunning Track, which requires long-horizon planning and sequential decision-making in the Pokemon RPG. Our Battling Track supplies a dataset of 20M+ battle trajectories alongside a suite of heuristic, RL, and LLM-based baselines capable of high-level competitive play. Our Speedrunning Track provides the first standardized evaluation framework for RPG speedrunning, including an open-source multi-agent orchestration system for modular, reproducible comparisons of harness-based LLM approaches. Our NeurIPS 2025 competition validates both the quality of our resources and the research community's interest in Pokemon, with over 100 teams competing across both tracks and winning solutions detailed in our paper. Participant submissions and our baselines reveal considerable gaps between generalist (LLM), specialist (RL), and elite human performance. Analysis against the BenchPress evaluation matrix shows that Pokemon battling is nearly orthogonal to standard LLM benchmarks, measuring capabilities not captured by existing suites and positioning Pokemon as an unsolved benchmark that can drive RL and LLM research forward. We transition to a living benchmark with a live leaderboard for Battling and self-contained evaluation for Speedrunning at https://pokeagentchallenge.com.

Given a strategically complex board game, human players can quickly learn to devise strategies after playing a few rounds. Autonomous agents require similar capabilities in realistic interactive environments, yet existing agent benchmarks often fail to fully capture such strategic and evolving decision-making scenarios. We present PTCG-Bench, a benchmark built on the Pok'{e}mon Trading Card Game (PTCG) that evaluates LLM agents at two complementary levels: (1) their decision-making performance within a single complex environment, and (2) their ability to self-evolving through accumulated experience. We further include a modular harness ablation to better interpret agent performance without conflating it with model capability. Our experiments show that, although LLM agents can achieve non-trivial gameplay performance, sustained and stable self-evolution remains challenging, and performance is sensitive to harness design. We hope that PTCG-Bench will facilitate future research on harness-aware and self-evolving agents in realistic interactive environments.

Can LLM agents carry a hard real-world problem from raw data to a system that holds its own against people? We study this in Hearthstone Battlegrounds, an eight-player auto-battler with stochastic shops and battles, hidden information and nearly a thousand interacting cards. We present AutoTavern, a self-improving research system: specialised LLM research agents share a typed research memory, every claim passes verification gates, and live games close the loop, so the agents improve the simulator, opponents and policy and, from the same feedback, their own research process; a human sets goals and rules on ambiguous mechanics. In 20 days AutoTavern built TavernGym, the first faithful, full-content reproduction of the live game, and delivered 23 versions of TavernAgent, trained with PPO against opponents calibrated to real games. TavernAgent plays complete games on the live ladder by itself: its rating rose from 6,000 to about 15,000 and, on the public leaderboard's measure, its last 20 records average a placement of 1.60 with 80% first places, better than the server's ten highest-rated players on every statistic (2.34, 59%). TavernBench, 960 tasks in 40 scenarios, shows that the system the agents built is the strongest player: TavernAgent answers 91% of the play tasks against at most 63% for frontier LLMs, and decides in 0.03 s where they need up to 26 s; within the second a live turn allows, it keeps 90% and no LLM more than 26%. LLM agents build far better than they play. We will open-source TavernBench and TavernGym at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/AutoTavern.