CATArena: Evaluation of LLM Agents through Iterative Tournament Competitions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26852v1
• Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:22:53 GMT
• Title: CATArena: Evaluation of LLM Agents through Iterative Tournament Competitions
• Authors: Lingyue Fu, Xin Ding, Yaoming Zhu, Shao Zhang, Lin Qiu, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Jiaxin Ding, Yong Yu,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have evolved from basic text generation to autonomously completing complex tasks through interaction with external tools.<n>In this work, we emphasize the importance of learning ability, including both self-improvement and peer-learning, as a core driver for agent evolution toward human-level intelligence.<n>We propose an iterative, competitive peer-learning framework, which allows agents to refine and optimize their strategies through repeated interactions and feedback.
• Score: 49.02422075498554
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have evolved from basic text generation to autonomously completing complex tasks through interaction with external tools. However, current benchmarks mainly assess end-to-end performance in fixed scenarios, restricting evaluation to specific skills and suffering from score saturation and growing dependence on expert annotation as agent capabilities improve. In this work, we emphasize the importance of learning ability, including both self-improvement and peer-learning, as a core driver for agent evolution toward human-level intelligence. We propose an iterative, competitive peer-learning framework, which allows agents to refine and optimize their strategies through repeated interactions and feedback, thereby systematically evaluating their learning capabilities. To address the score saturation issue in current benchmarks, we introduce CATArena, a tournament-style evaluation platform featuring four diverse board and card games with open-ended scoring. By providing tasks without explicit upper score limits, CATArena enables continuous and dynamic evaluation of rapidly advancing agent capabilities. Experimental results and analyses involving both minimal and commercial code agents demonstrate that CATArena provides reliable, stable, and scalable benchmarking for core agent abilities, particularly learning ability and strategy coding.

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