EcoGym: Evaluating LLMs for Long-Horizon Plan-and-Execute in Interactive Economies

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Authors: Xueyu Hu, Jinxiang Xia, Shengze Xu, Kangqi Song, Yishuo Yuan, Guibin Zhang, Jincheng Ren, Boyu Feng, Li Lu, Tieyong Zeng, Jiaheng Liu, Minghao Liu
+4 more He Zhu, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wei Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Long-horizon planning is widely recognized as a core capability of autonomous LLM-based agents; however, current evaluation frameworks suffer from being largely episodic, domain-specific, or insufficiently grounded in persistent economic dynamics. We introduce EcoGym, a generalizable benchmark for continuous plan-and-execute decision making in interactive economies. EcoGym comprises three diverse environments: Vending (adapted from the closed-source Vending-Bench, with full open-source release), Freelance (new), and Operation (new), implemented in a unified decision-making process with standardized interfaces, and budgeted actions over an effectively unbounded horizon (1000+ steps if 365 day-loops for evaluation). The evaluation of EcoGym is based on business-relevant outcomes (e.g., net worth, income, and DAU), targeting long-term strategic coherence and robustness under partial observability and stochasticity. Experiments across eleven leading LLMs expose a systematic tension: no single model dominates across all three scenarios. Critically, we find that models exhibit significant suboptimality in either high-level strategies or efficient actions executions. EcoGym is released as an open, extensible testbed for transparent long-horizon agent evaluation and for studying controllability utility trade-offs in economic settings.

Fields of Study & Subjects

AI-based Problem Solving and Planning Artificial Intelligence Applications Reinforcement Learning in Robotics

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
10 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint