# Large Language Models are Pretty Good Zero-Shot Video Game Bug Detectors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02506 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02506/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15723/) (2020)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06680/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Cloze Questions for Few Shot Text Classification and Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07676/) (2020)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [ClipCap: CLIP Prefix for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09734/) (2021)
- [Emergent Tool Use From Multi-Agent Autocurricula](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07528/) (2019)
- [The Natural Language Decathlon: Multitask Learning as Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.08730/) (2018)
- [ZeroCap: Zero-Shot Image-to-Text Generation for Visual-Semantic Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14447/) (2021)
- [Structured Pruning of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.08571/) (2015)
- [Language Model Cascades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10342/) (2022)
- [Jigsaw: Large Language Models meet Program Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02969/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Large Language Models and Video Games: A Preliminary Scoping Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02613/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Game Playing Agents and Large Models: Methods, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10249/) (2024)
- [PhysGame: Uncovering Physical Commonsense Violations in Gameplay Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01800/) (2024)
- [VideoGameBunny: Towards vision assistants for video games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15295/) (2024)
- [ING-VP: MLLMs cannot Play Easy Vision-based Games Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06555/) (2024)
- [VideoGameQA-Bench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Video Game Quality Assurance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15952/) (2025)
- [Level Up Your Tutorials: VLMs for Game Tutorials Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08396/) (2024)
- [Open-Ended Video Game Glitch Detection with Agentic Reasoning and Temporal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07818/) (2026)
- [Generative transformations and patterns in LLM-native approaches for software verification and falsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09384/) (2024)
- [InPhyRe Discovers: Large Multimodal Models Struggle in Inductive Physical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12263/) (2025)
- [Synergizing Code Coverage and Gameplay Intent: Coverage-Aware Game Playtesting with LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12706/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Graph-enhanced Large Language Model for Incremental Game PlayTesting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02534/) (2025)
- [Order from Chaos: Physical World Understanding from Glitchy Gameplay Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16471/) (2026)
- [TempGlitch: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Temporal Glitch Detection in Gameplay Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21443/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video game testing requires game-specific knowledge as well as common sense reasoning about the events in the game. While AI-driven agents can satisfy the first requirement, it is not yet possible to meet the second requirement automatically. Therefore, video game testing often still relies on manual testing, and human testers are required to play the game thoroughly to detect bugs. As a result, it is challenging to fully automate game testing. In this study, we explore the possibility of leveraging the zero-shot capabilities of large language models for video game bug detection. By formulating the bug detection problem as a question-answering task, we show that large language models can identify which event is buggy in a sequence of textual descriptions of events from a game. To this end, we introduce the GameBugDescriptions benchmark dataset, which consists of 167 buggy gameplay videos and a total of 334 question-answer pairs across 8 games. We extensively evaluate the performance of six models across the OPT and InstructGPT large language model families on our benchmark dataset. Our results show promising results for employing language models to detect video game bugs. With the proper prompting technique, we could achieve an accuracy of 70.66%, and on some video games, up to 78.94%. Our code, evaluation data and the benchmark can be found on https://asgaardlab.github.io/LLMxBugs