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Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Evaluating Strategic Planning and Execution of LLM Agents in an Auction Arena

9 Oct 2023arXiv:2310.05746archive 2025-07-28

Jiangjie Chen, Siyu Yuan, Rong Ye, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Kyle Richardson

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) showcase advanced reasoning, yet NLP evaluations often depend on static benchmarks. Evaluating this necessitates environments that test strategic reasoning in dynamic, competitive scenarios requiring long-term planning. We introduce AucArena, a novel evaluation suite that simulates auctions, a setting chosen for being highly unpredictable and involving many skills related to resource and risk management, while also being easy to evaluate. We conduct controlled experiments using state-of-the-art LLMs to power bidding agents to benchmark their planning and execution skills. Our research demonstrates that LLMs, such as GPT-4, possess key skills for auction participation, such as budget management and goal adherence, which improve with adaptive strategies. This highlights LLMs' potential in modeling complex social interactions in competitive contexts. However, variability in LLM performance and occasional outperformance by simpler methods indicate opportunities for further advancements in LLM design and the value of our simulation environment for ongoing testing and refinement.

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draw_plot jiangjiechen/auction-arena/src/bidder_base.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · e0fa0538b4027d7d · report
extract_numbered_list jiangjiechen/auction-arena/utils.py official repository ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 62974c29fc1da809 · report
markdown_to_html_with_syntax_highlight jiangjiechen/auction-arena/app_modules/utils.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f6303bcf9c3d7bbe · report
normalize_markdown jiangjiechen/auction-arena/app_modules/utils.py official repository ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 202b91dda0f114a4 · report
trace_back jiangjiechen/auction-arena/utils.py official repository ran fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 3ffd0d6e925165e9 · report
convert_mdtext jiangjiechen/auction-arena/app_modules/utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4329e894eb80692a · report
item_list_equal jiangjiechen/auction-arena/src/item_base.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 1c2d0a7fd73e36e0 · report
postprocess jiangjiechen/auction-arena/app_modules/overwrites.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f7cad181905c754b · report

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-4Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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