NAACL 2025findings5 citations

SimulBench: Evaluating Language Models with Creative Simulation Tasks

Qi Jia, Xiang Yue, Tuney Zheng, Jie Huang, Bill Yuchen Lin

Abstract

We introduce SimulBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) across a diverse collection of creative simulation tasks, such as acting as a Linux terminal or playing text games with users. While these simulation tasks serve as effective measures of an LLM’s general intelligence, they are seldom incorporated into existing benchmarks. A major challenge is to develop an evaluation framework for testing different LLMs fairly while preserving the multi-round interactive nature of simulation tasks between users and AI. To tackle this issue, we suggest using a fixed LLM as a user agent to engage with an LLM to collect dialogues first under different tasks. Then, challenging dialogue scripts are extracted for evaluating different target LLMs. To facilitate automatic assessment on SimulBench, GPT-4 is employed as the evaluator, tasked with reviewing the quality of the final response generated by the target LLMs given multi-turn dialogue scripts. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that these creative simulation tasks continue to pose a significant challenge with their unique natures and show the gap between proprietary models and the most advanced open LLMs. For example, GPT-4-turbo outperforms LLaMA-3-70b-Chat on 18.55% more cases.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{jia-etal-2025-simulbench,
    title = "{S}imul{B}ench: Evaluating Language Models with Creative Simulation Tasks",
    author = "Jia, Qi  and
      Yue, Xiang  and
      Zheng, Tuney  and
      Huang, Jie  and
      Lin, Bill Yuchen",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-naacl.453/",
    pages = "8118--8131",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-195-7"
}
SimulBench: Evaluating Language Models with Creative Simulation Tasks · NAACL 2025