AgentQuest: Benchmarking LLM and VLM Agents on Long-Horizon Interactive Tasks

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission1630 Authors

Keywords: LLM, VLM, Agents, Benchmark, RL

Abstract:

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) possess extensive knowledge and exhibit promising reasoning abilities, however, they still struggle to perform well in complex, dynamic environments. Real-world tasks require handling intricate interactions, advanced spatial reasoning, long-term planning, and continuous exploration of new strategies—areas in which we lack effective methodologies for comprehensively evaluating these capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce AgentQuest, a novel benchmark designed to assess the agentic capabilities of LLMs and VLMs through a diverse set of challenging games. Our benchmark incorporates a range of existing reinforcement learning environments with varying levels of difficulty, including tasks that are solvable by non-expert humans in seconds to extremely challenging ones that may take years to master (e.g., the NetHack Learning Environment).
We devise fine-grained metrics to measure performance and conduct an extensive evaluation of several popular open-source and closed-source LLMs and VLMs. Our findings indicate that while current models achieve partial success in the easier games, they struggle significantly with more challenging tasks. Notably, we observe severe deficiencies in vision-based decision-making, as models perform worse when visual representations of the environments are provided. We release AgentQuest as an open and user-friendly benchmark to facilitate future research and development in the agentic community.

Primary Area: datasets and benchmarks

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Submission Number: 1630