{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/benchmarking-llms-swarm-intelligence","title":"Benchmarking LLMs' Swarm intelligence","arxiv_id":"2505.04364","date":"2025-05-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kai Ruan","Mowen Huang","Ji-Rong Wen","Hao Sun"],"abstract":"Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for complex reasoning, yet their capacity for emergent coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) when operating under strict swarm-like constraints-limited local perception and communication-remains largely unexplored. Existing benchmarks often do not fully capture the unique challenges of decentralized coordination when agents operate with incomplete spatio-temporal information. To bridge this gap, we introduce SwarmBench, a novel benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the swarm intelligence capabilities of LLMs acting as decentralized agents. SwarmBench features five foundational MAS coordination tasks (Pursuit, Synchronization, Foraging, Flocking, Transport) within a configurable 2D grid environment, forcing agents to rely solely on local sensory input ($k\\times k$ view) and local communication. We propose metrics for coordination effectiveness and analyze emergent group dynamics. Zero-shot evaluations of leading LLMs (e.g., deepseek-v3, o4-mini) reveal significant task-dependent performance variations. While some rudimentary coordination is observed, our results indicate that current LLMs significantly struggle with robust long-range planning and adaptive strategy formation under the uncertainty inherent in these decentralized scenarios. Assessing LLMs under such swarm-like constraints is crucial for understanding their utility in future decentralized intelligent systems. We release SwarmBench as an open, extensible toolkit-built on a customizable physical system-providing environments, prompts, evaluation scripts, and comprehensive datasets. This aims to foster reproducible research into LLM-based MAS coordination and the theoretical underpinnings of emergent collective behavior under severe informational decentralization. Our code repository is available at https://github.com/x66ccff/swarmbench.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04364v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.04364v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"benchmarking-llms-swarm-intelligence","repo_url":"https://github.com/x66ccff/swarmbench","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"mas","method_name":"MAS"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2505.04364","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}