Strat-Reasoner: Reinforcing Strategic Reasoning of LLMs in Multi-Agent Games

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04906v1
• Date: Wed, 06 May 2026 13:35:14 GMT
• Title: Strat-Reasoner: Reinforcing Strategic Reasoning of LLMs in Multi-Agent Games
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models struggle in multi-agent games where the final outcome depends on the joint strategies of all agents.<n>Existing single-agent reinforcement learning approaches and their multi-agent extensions fail to address these challenges.<n>We propose Strat-Reasoner, a novel RL-based framework that improves LLMs' strategic reasoning ability in multi-agent games.
• Score: 21.17910455412377
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in certain reasoning tasks, they struggle in multi-agent games where the final outcome depends on the joint strategies of all agents. In multi-agent games, the non-stationarity of other agents brings significant challenges on the evaluation of the reasoning process and the credit assignment over multiple reasoning steps. Existing single-agent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches and their multi-agent extensions fail to address these challenges as they do not incorporate other agents in the reasoning process. In this work, we propose Strat-Reasoner, a novel RL-based framework that improves LLMs' strategic reasoning ability in multi-agent games. We introduce a novel recursive reasoning paradigm where an agent's reasoning also integrates other agents' reasoning processes. To provide effective reward signals for the intermediate reasoning sequences, we employ a centralized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) comparison module to evaluate the reasoning quality. Finally, we compute an accurate hybrid advantage and develop a group-relative RL approach to optimize the LLM policy. Experimental results show that Strat-Reasoner substantially improves strategic abilities of underlying LLMs, achieving 22.1\% average performance improvements across various multi-agent games.

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