# ActionReasoningBench: Reasoning about Actions with and without Ramification Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04046 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04046/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 23 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Spatial and embodied reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/spatial-and-embodied-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [TravelPlanner: A Benchmark for Real-World Planning with Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01622/) (2024)
- [PlanBench: An Extensible Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Planning and Reasoning about Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10498/) (2022)
- [LegalBench: A Collaboratively Built Benchmark for Measuring Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11462/) (2023)
- [A Diverse Corpus for Evaluating and Developing English Math Word Problem Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15772/) (2021)
- [On the Planning Abilities of Large Language Models : A Critical Investigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15771/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning: Progresses and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00157/) (2024)
- [FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00840/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Pre-trained Large Language Models to Construct and Utilize World Models for Model-based Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14909/) (2023)
- [Embers of Autoregression: Understanding Large Language Models Through the Problem They are Trained to Solve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13638/) (2023)
- [LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16289/) (2023)
- [UNICORN on RAINBOW: A Universal Commonsense Reasoning Model on a New Multitask Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13009/) (2021)
- [CREAK: A Dataset for Commonsense Reasoning over Entity Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01653/) (2021)
- [Found in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts Better via Plug-and-Play Positional Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04797/) (2024)
- [Towards LogiGLUE: A Brief Survey and A Benchmark for Analyzing Logical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00836/) (2023)
- [Differentiable Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14439/) (2020)
- [Can Transformers Reason About Effects of Actions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09938/) (2020)
- [EvEntS ReaLM: Event Reasoning of Entity States via Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05392/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [UnSeenTimeQA: Time-Sensitive Question-Answering Beyond LLMs' Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03525/) (2024)
- [Computational Reasoning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20771/) (2025)
- [Make Planning Research Rigorous Again!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21674/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reasoning about Actions and Change (RAC) has historically played a pivotal role in solving foundational AI problems, such as the frame problem. It has driven advancements in AI fields, such as non-monotonic and commonsense reasoning. RAC remains crucial for AI systems that operate in dynamic environments, engage in interactive scenarios, or rely on commonsense reasoning. Despite substantial advances made by Large Language Models (LLMs) in various AI domains, their performance in RAC remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a new diagnostic benchmark, ActionReasoningBench, which encompasses 8 domains and includes questions for up to 19 action sequences. This benchmark rigorously evaluates LLMs across six key RAC dimensions: Fluent Tracking, State Tracking, Action Executability, Effects of Actions, Numerical RAC, and Composite Questions. LLMs demonstrate average accuracy rates of 73.55%, 65.63%, 58.73%, and 62.38% on the former four dimensions, which are frequently discussed in RAC literature. However, the performance on the latter two dimensions, which introduce complex and novel reasoning questions, the average performance of LLMs is lowered to 33.16% and 51.19%, respectively, reflecting a 17.9% performance decline. We also introduce new ramification constraints to capture the indirect effects of actions, providing deeper insights into RAC challenges. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, including both open-source and commercial models, reveals challenges across all RAC dimensions, particularly in handling ramifications, with GPT-4o failing to solve any question and o1-preview achieving a score of only 18.4%.