TTT-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning Ability with Simple and Novel Tic-Tac-Toe-style Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mishra, Prakamya, Liu, Jiang, Wu, Jialian, Yu, Xiaodong, Liu, Zicheng, Barsoum, Emad
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Mishra, Prakamya
Liu, Jiang
Wu, Jialian
Yu, Xiaodong
Liu, Zicheng
Barsoum, Emad
author_facet Mishra, Prakamya
Liu, Jiang
Wu, Jialian
Yu, Xiaodong
Liu, Zicheng
Barsoum, Emad
contents Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities across a broad range of tasks including Olympiad-level mathematical problems, indicating evidence of their complex reasoning abilities. While many reasoning benchmarks focus on the STEM domain, the ability of LRMs to reason correctly in broader task domains remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce \textbf{TTT-Bench}, a new benchmark that is designed to evaluate basic strategic, spatial, and logical reasoning abilities in LRMs through a suite of four two-player Tic-Tac-Toe-style games that humans can effortlessly solve from a young age. We propose a simple yet scalable programmatic approach for generating verifiable two-player game problems for TTT-Bench. Although these games are trivial for humans, they require reasoning about the intentions of the opponent, as well as the game board's spatial configurations, to ensure a win. We evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art LRMs, and \textbf{discover that the models that excel at hard math problems frequently fail at these simple reasoning games}. Further testing reveals that our evaluated reasoning models score on average $\downarrow$ 41\% \& $\downarrow$ 5\% lower on TTT-Bench compared to MATH 500 \& AIME 2024 respectively, with larger models achieving higher performance using shorter reasoning traces, where most of the models struggle on long-term strategic reasoning situations on simple and new TTT-Bench tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_10209
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TTT-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning Ability with Simple and Novel Tic-Tac-Toe-style Games
Mishra, Prakamya
Liu, Jiang
Wu, Jialian
Yu, Xiaodong
Liu, Zicheng
Barsoum, Emad
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities across a broad range of tasks including Olympiad-level mathematical problems, indicating evidence of their complex reasoning abilities. While many reasoning benchmarks focus on the STEM domain, the ability of LRMs to reason correctly in broader task domains remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce \textbf{TTT-Bench}, a new benchmark that is designed to evaluate basic strategic, spatial, and logical reasoning abilities in LRMs through a suite of four two-player Tic-Tac-Toe-style games that humans can effortlessly solve from a young age. We propose a simple yet scalable programmatic approach for generating verifiable two-player game problems for TTT-Bench. Although these games are trivial for humans, they require reasoning about the intentions of the opponent, as well as the game board's spatial configurations, to ensure a win. We evaluate a diverse set of state-of-the-art LRMs, and \textbf{discover that the models that excel at hard math problems frequently fail at these simple reasoning games}. Further testing reveals that our evaluated reasoning models score on average $\downarrow$ 41\% \& $\downarrow$ 5\% lower on TTT-Bench compared to MATH 500 \& AIME 2024 respectively, with larger models achieving higher performance using shorter reasoning traces, where most of the models struggle on long-term strategic reasoning situations on simple and new TTT-Bench tasks.
title TTT-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning Ability with Simple and Novel Tic-Tac-Toe-style Games
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10209