# GameTraversalBenchmark: Evaluating Planning Abilities Of Large Language Models Through Traversing 2D Game Maps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07765 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07765/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [PlanBench: An Extensible Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Planning and Reasoning about Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10498/) (2022)
- [FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03214/) (2023)
- [Ghost in the Minecraft: Generally Capable Agents for Open-World Environments via Large Language Models with Text-based Knowledge and Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17144/) (2023)
- [Rainbow Teaming: Open-Ended Generation of Diverse Adversarial Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16822/) (2024)
- [SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07045/) (2023)
- [Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15402/) (2023)
- [LLMs Can't Plan, But Can Help Planning in LLM-Modulo Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01817/) (2024)
- [LLMatic: Neural Architecture Search via Large Language Models and Quality Diversity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01102/) (2023)
- [Level Generation Through Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05817/) (2023)
- [An investigation of model-free planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03559/) (2019)
- [MarioGPT: Open-Ended Text2Level Generation through Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05981/) (2023)
- [Do LLMs Understand Social Knowledge? Evaluating the Sociability of Large Language Models with SocKET Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14938/) (2023)
- [TrustGPT: A Benchmark for Trustworthy and Responsible Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11507/) (2023)
- [The Chess Transformer: Mastering Play using Generative Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04057/) (2020)
- [Automating the Generation of Prompts for LLM-based Action Choice in PDDL Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09830/) (2023)
- [Practical PCG Through Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18243/) (2023)
- [Word2World: Generating Stories and Worlds through Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06686/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Measuring what Matters: Construct Validity in Large Language Model Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04703/) (2025)
- [lmgame-Bench: How Good are LLMs at Playing Games?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15146/) (2025)
- [VideoGameBench: Can Vision-Language Models complete popular video games?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18134/) (2025)
- [Agents of Change: Self-Evolving LLM Agents for Strategic Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04651/) (2025)
- [GVGAI-LLM: Evaluating Large Language Model Agents with Infinite Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08501/) (2025)
- [Agentic Environment Engineering for Large Language Models: A Survey of Environment Modeling, Synthesis, Evaluation, and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12191/) (2026)
- [PuzzleJAX: A Benchmark for Reasoning and Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16821/) (2025)
- [Towards Generalist Game Players: An Investigation of Foundation Models in the Game Multiverse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09965/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated great success in generating and understanding natural language. While they have also shown potential beyond the domain of natural language, it remains an open question as to what extent and in which way these LLMs can plan. We investigate their planning capabilities by proposing GameTraversalBenchmark (GTB), a benchmark consisting of diverse 2D grid-based game maps. An LLM succeeds if it can traverse through given objectives, with a minimum number of steps and a minimum number of generation errors. We evaluate a number of LLMs on GTB and found that GPT-4-Turbo achieved the highest score of 44.97% on GTBScore (GTBS), a composite score that combines the three above criteria. Furthermore, we preliminarily test large reasoning models, namely o1, which scores 67.84% on GTBS, indicating that the benchmark remains challenging for current models. Code, data, and documentation are available at https://github.com/umair-nasir14/Game-Traversal-Benchmark.