# The PokeAgent Challenge: Competitive and Long-Context Learning at Scale

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15563 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15563/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Continual Harness: Online Adaptation for Self-Improving Foundation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09998/) (2026)
- [OpenGame: Open Agentic Coding for Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18394/) (2026)
- [Odysseus: Scaling VLMs to 100+ Turn Decision-Making in Games via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00347/) (2026)
- [Towards Generalist Game Players: An Investigation of Foundation Models in the Game Multiverse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09965/) (2026)
- [AI Finds A Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23875/) (2026)
- [PokeRL: Reinforcement Learning for Pokemon Red](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10812/) (2026)
- [ASH: Agents that Self-Hone in Long-Horizon Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14211/) (2026)
- [PTCG-Bench: Can LLM Agents Master Pok'emon Trading Card Game?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29653/) (2026)
- [FromPitch2Board: Benchmarking LLM Agents in Long-Horizon Football Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34710/) (2026)
- [SpeedrunBench: Challenging LLM Agents with Video Game Speedrunning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08076/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the PokeAgent Challenge, a large-scale benchmark for decision-making research built on Pokemon's multi-agent battle system and expansive role-playing game (RPG) environment. Partial observability, game-theoretic reasoning, and long-horizon planning remain open problems for frontier AI, yet few benchmarks stress all three simultaneously under realistic conditions. PokeAgent targets these limitations at scale through two complementary tracks: our Battling Track, which calls for strategic reasoning and generalization under partial observability in competitive Pokemon battles, and our Speedrunning Track, which requires long-horizon planning and sequential decision-making in the Pokemon RPG. Our Battling Track supplies a dataset of 20M+ battle trajectories alongside a suite of heuristic, RL, and LLM-based baselines capable of high-level competitive play. Our Speedrunning Track provides the first standardized evaluation framework for RPG speedrunning, including an open-source multi-agent orchestration system for modular, reproducible comparisons of harness-based LLM approaches. Our NeurIPS 2025 competition validates both the quality of our resources and the research community's interest in Pokemon, with over 100 teams competing across both tracks and winning solutions detailed in our paper. Participant submissions and our baselines reveal considerable gaps between generalist (LLM), specialist (RL), and elite human performance. Analysis against the BenchPress evaluation matrix shows that Pokemon battling is nearly orthogonal to standard LLM benchmarks, measuring capabilities not captured by existing suites and positioning Pokemon as an unsolved benchmark that can drive RL and LLM research forward. We transition to a living benchmark with a live leaderboard for Battling and self-contained evaluation for Speedrunning at https://pokeagentchallenge.com.