# RuleTrek: Benchmarking Agentic Rule Reasoning in Complex Scenarios

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19698 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19698/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 9 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15763/) (2026)
- [ProofWriter: Generating Implications, Proofs, and Abductive Statements over Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13048/) (2020)
- [Transformers as Soft Reasoners over Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05867/) (2020)
- [PolicyQA: A Reading Comprehension Dataset for Privacy Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02557/) (2020)
- [RuleArena: A Benchmark for Rule-Guided Reasoning with LLMs in Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08972/) (2024)
- [TableEval: A Real-World Benchmark for Complex, Multilingual, and Multi-Structured Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03949/) (2025)
- [AGORA: An Archive-Grounded Benchmark for Agentic Workplace Document Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24526/) (2026)
- [STAGE-Claw: Automated State-based Agent Benchmarking for Realistic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10394/) (2026)
- [Beyond Case Law: Evaluating Structure-Aware Retrieval and Safety in Statute-Centric Legal QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06173/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly tackle complex real-world tasks in specialized domains. However, identifying and correctly applying domain-specific rules remains challenging when scenario information is distributed across multiple files. Existing rule-reasoning benchmarks typically represent scenarios using only a few factual statements, simplifying the identification and application of relevant rules. To address this gap, this paper introduces RuleTrek, a multi-domain benchmark for agentic rule reasoning in complex scenarios. Its rule-grounded construction pipeline extracts structured rule graphs, generates and incrementally composes rule-specific sub-scenarios while ensuring consistency and solvability. To systematically evaluate agentic rule reasoning in complex scenarios, RuleTrek assesses three capabilities in interactive workspaces: Rule Identification (RI), Rule Deduction (RD), and End-to-End Rule Reasoning (E2E). Experiments on 11 frontier LLMs show that the highest RI and RD scores are only 62.47% and 60.43%, respectively, while E2E scores range from 26.97% to 55.29%. These results demonstrate that current LLM agents face substantial challenges in rule reasoning over complex scenarios. We make our code and dataset publicly available at hrefhttps://github.com/yuan247/RuleTrekRuleTrek.
