Papers › CivRealm: A Learning and Reasoning Odyssey in Civilization for Decision-Making Agents

CivRealm: A Learning and Reasoning Odyssey in Civilization for Decision-Making Agents

19 Jan 2024arXiv:2401.10568archive 2025-07-28

Siyuan Qi, Shuo Chen, Yexin Li, Xiangyu Kong, Junqi Wang, Bangcheng Yang, Pring Wong, Yifan Zhong, Xiaoyuan Zhang, Zhaowei Zhang, Nian Liu, Wei Wang, Yaodong Yang, Song-Chun Zhu

The generalization of decision-making agents encompasses two fundamental elements: learning from past experiences and reasoning in novel contexts. However, the predominant emphasis in most interactive environments is on learning, often at the expense of complexity in reasoning. In this paper, we introduce CivRealm, an environment inspired by the Civilization game. Civilization's profound alignment with human history and society necessitates sophisticated learning, while its ever-changing situations demand strong reasoning to generalize. Particularly, CivRealm sets up an imperfect-information general-sum game with a changing number of players; it presents a plethora of complex features, challenging the agent to deal with open-ended stochastic environments that require diplomacy and negotiation skills. Within CivRealm, we provide interfaces for two typical agent types: tensor-based agents that focus on learning, and language-based agents that emphasize reasoning. To catalyze further research, we present initial results for both paradigms. The canonical RL-based agents exhibit reasonable performance in mini-games, whereas both RL- and LLM-based agents struggle to make substantial progress in the full game. Overall, CivRealm stands as a unique learning and reasoning challenge for decision-making agents. The code is available at https://github.com/bigai-ai/civrealm.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

bigai-ai/civrealm officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Decision Making

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

CivRealm

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Focus

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections