mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Agentick: A Unified Benchmark for General Sequential Decision-Making Agents

arXiv 2605.06869 ↗First posted 7 May 2026cs.AIcited by 1

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks

Abstract (arXiv)

AI agent research spans a wide spectrum: from RL agents that learn from scratch to foundation model agents that leverage pre-trained knowledge, yet no unified benchmark enables fair comparison across these approaches. We present Agentick, a benchmark for sequential decision-making agents designed to evaluate RL, LLM, VLM, hybrid, and human agents on common ground and to power research on the fundamental challenges of sequential decision-making. Agentick provides 37 procedurally generated tasks across six capability categories, four difficulty levels, and five observation modalities, all exposed through a single Gymnasium-compatible interface. The benchmark ships with a Coding API, oracle reference policies for all tasks, pre-built SFT datasets, a composable agent harness, and a live leaderboard. An evaluation spanning 27 configurations and over 90,000 episodes reveals that no single approach dominates: GPT-5 mini leads overall at 0.309 oracle-normalized score while PPO dominates planning and multi-agent tasks; the reasoning harness multiplies LLM performance by 3-10x; and ASCII observations consistently outperform natural language. These findings highlight the substantial room for improvement that remains across all agent paradigms. Agentick's capability-decomposed, multi-modal design provides the empirical infrastructure needed to drive progress toward general autonomous agents, both as an evaluation framework and as a training ground for RL post-training of foundation models in truly sequential environments.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 30 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 May 2026.

Builds on

30 of 43 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026ARC-AGI-3: A New Challenge for Frontier Agentic Intelligence24 Mar

Other references · 29

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  2. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  3. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
  4. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  5. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
  6. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
  7. 2018Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actorcited by 4,635
  8. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  9. 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,302
  10. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  11. 2018DeepMind Control Suitecited by 935
  12. 2021Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipicecited by 781
17 more
  1. 2023Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Modelscited by 542
  2. 2019Leveraging Procedural Generation to Benchmark Reinforcement Learningcited by 478
  3. 2023Minigrid & Miniworld: Modular & Customizable Reinforcement Learning Environments for Goal-Oriented Taskscited by 320
  4. 2018TextWorld: A Learning Environment for Text-based Gamescited by 304
  5. 2020The NetHack Learning Environmentcited by 196
  6. 2021Benchmarking the Spectrum of Agent Capabilitiescited by 193
  7. 2023Understanding plasticity in neural networkscited by 170
  8. 2024BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Gamescited by 141
  9. 2019Behaviour Suite for Reinforcement Learningcited by 129
  10. 2025REASONING GYM: Reasoning Environments for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewardscited by 121
  11. 2023Motif: Intrinsic Motivation from Artificial Intelligence Feedbackcited by 99
  12. 2021MiniHack the Planet: A Sandbox for Open-Ended Reinforcement Learning Researchcited by 96
  13. 2024Craftax: A Lightning-Fast Benchmark for Open-Ended Reinforcement Learningcited by 80
  14. 2021DR3: Value-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Requires Explicit Regularizationcited by 66
  15. 2024MaestroMotif: Skill Design from Artificial Intelligence Feedbackcited by 24
  16. 2025Stable Gradients for Stable Learning at Scale in Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 22
  17. 2025ARM-FM: Automated Reward Machines via Foundation Models for Compositional Reinforcement Learningcited by 5

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