OmniGameArena: A Unified UE5 Benchmark for VLM Game Agents with Improvement Dynamics Mingxian Lin1 , Shengju Qian2, ‡ , Yuqi Liu3 , Yi-Hua Huang1 , Yiyu Wang2 , Wei Huang1 , Yitang Li4 , Fan Zhang3 , Zeyu Hu2 , Lingting Zhu2 , Xin Wang2 , Xiaojuan Qi1, † 1
The University of Hong Kong, 2 LIGHTSPEED, 3 The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 4 Tsinghua University ‡ Project Leader
† Corresponding Author
Project Page: https://mxlin043.github.io/OmniGameArena/
arXiv:2606.09826v1 [cs.CV] 8 Jun 2026
Abstract
report a single first-attempt score per (agent, game) pair, leaving invisible the trajectory by which an agent improves under repeated interaction with the same task. They also lean heavily toward singleagent Solo play, while adversarial (PvP) and cooperative (Coop) regimes remain underrepresented even though they probe distinct capabilities such as opponent modeling, role assignment, and recovery from a teammate’s mistakes. Whether an agent can adapt under repeated reflection, and whether it can do so in adversarial or cooperative settings, therefore remains largely unmeasured. We address both with OmniGameArena, a realtime benchmark of twelve newly built Unreal Engine 5 games spanning Solo, PvP and Coop, and the Improvement Dynamics Curve (IDC), an agenticreflection harness built on top of it. The twelve games are authored for this benchmark rather than reused from public titles, lowering the risk of pretraining leakage, and share unified action interfaces (keyboard-mouse, gamepad) so that commercial VLMs, open-weight VLMs, and specialized game policies can all be evaluated under matched environment conditions. The IDC harness runs each (agent, game) instance for multiple rounds: the agent plays K episodes under a current skill prompt, after which a reflector LLM inspects the trajectories through tool-use, deciding on its own what to read and when to stop, before refining the skill for the next round. We report both the perround score sequence (the IDC of that instance) and a transfer score on held-out task variants. Across twelve agents on the cold-start leaderboard, no single VLM dominates, and commercial agents hold a wide gap over open-weight VLMs and specialized policies. Among the four top agents that we run through IDC, all four improve over their cold-start baseline through reflection, yet peak performance is typically reached mid-curve rather than at the final round. Most notably, origintask improvement and held-out variant transfer can
Vision-language model (VLM) agents are increasingly deployed in interactive game environments. Yet game benchmarks for VLM agents typically report a single first-attempt score per (agent, game) pair, focus on singleagent Solo play, and lack unified protocols for evaluating heterogeneous agent classes (commercial VLMs, open-weight VLMs, and specialized game policies) on the same footing. We address these gaps with OmniGameArena, a real-time benchmark of twelve newly built Unreal Engine 5 games spanning Solo (7), PvP (3), and Coop (2) with unified action interfaces, and the Improvement Dynamics Curve (IDC), an agentic-reflection harness in which a tool-using reflector LLM autonomously refines a bounded skill prompt across multiple rounds. Beyond cold-start leaderboard scores, IDC exposes two additional observables for each (agent, game) pair: how the score evolves across reflection rounds, and how the learned skill behaves on held-out task variants. We report these observables for twelve VLM agents on the cold-start leaderboard and four top agents under IDC.
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Introduction
Foundation models are increasingly evaluated by how they act, not only by what they answer, and games are a natural stress test for this shift (Wang et al., 2023; Tan et al., 2024; Paglieri et al., 2024): an agent must read a changing visual scene, choose actions under time pressure, plan across delayed rewards, and adapt when the environment resists. Game benchmarks now span text-only worlds, 2D grid suites, and 3D open environments built on existing commercial titles, and have driven rapid progress in vision-language game agents (Tan et al., 2025; Magne et al., 2026; Wang et al., 2025b). Yet current benchmarks rarely measure two properties that matter for deploying these agents. Most 1
Omni Game Arena 12 UE5 Games
Solo
PvP
Coop
……
Obstacle Run
Monster Shooting
Scene Escape
Last Stand
Sky Duel
Crystal Guard
Midline Clash
Shared-floor Delivery
Real-time Harness Observation
Agent
Adapters
Commercial VLMs
Prompt -> Keys
Open-source VLMs
Prompt -> Pad
Keyboard-Mouse Policies
Keys -> Keys
Handoff Cooperation
Real-time Execution (Loop) UE5 Env
Score / Logs
time
...
UE5 Env
Leaderboard
Inference (Agent) Action Chunk (Adapter)
Gamepad Policies
Trajectory Logs
Pad -> Pad
Control Applied (Env)
Game world keeps ticking
What We Report
Figure 1: OmniGameArena at a glance. Twelve newly built UE5 games span Solo (7), PvP (3), and Coop (2) regimes (top). Heterogeneous agents (commercial VLMs, open-weight VLMs, keyboard-mouse policies, and gamepad policies) connect to the same real-time UE5 environment through documented adapters (middle). Evaluation reports the cold-start leaderboard and the Improvement Dynamics Curve (IDC) under multi-round reflection (bottom).
diverge in our experiments; this divergence is hidden by single-round leaderboard scores and is a central observable IDC exposes. To summarize, our contributions are threefold: (i) OmniGameArena, a twelve-game UE5 benchmark spanning Solo, PvP, and Coop with unified action interfaces and game instances built specifically for this benchmark; (ii) the IDC harness, an agentic-reflection framework whose autonomous tool-use reflector refines a bounded skill prompt across R rounds, with persistent memory and best-skill rollback; and (iii) an empirical study across twelve agents showing that leadership rotates across games and that origin-task gain does not by itself predict held-out variant transfer.
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multimodal demands, and more recent suites built on Minecraft or general visual benchmarks (VMAGE (Zheng et al., 2025), Cradle (Tan et al., 2024), VideoGameBench (Zhang et al., 2025)) extended evaluation into 3D open worlds with longhorizon planning from pixels. Beyond game playing, related benchmarks probe embodied reasoning and action in complex 3D environments (Lin et al., 2025; Zhu et al., 2026) and unified reasoning across video-generation models (Luo et al., 2025), but neither targets multi-regime, real-time game interaction. Two limitations of these benchmarks motivate our work: most reuse existing commercial titles, leaving them exposed to pre-training contamination; and few cover Solo, PvP, and Coop regimes in a single real-time environment. OmniGameArena addresses both with twelve newly built UE5 games that span all three interaction regimes. Game-playing LLM and VLM agents. Early LLM game agents operated in text-only environments (Hausknecht et al., 2020; Tsai et al., 2023) and 2D grid worlds (Feng et al., 2023; Küttler et al., 2020). Voyager (Wang et al., 2023) and MineDojo (Fan et al., 2022) extended LLM agents to 3D Minecraft, but the heavy per-game engineering they require limits cross-game generality. The current VLM-agent generation (Li et al., 2025; Bai et al., 2026; Wang et al., 2025b; Tan et al., 2025; Magne
Related Work
Benchmarks in game environments. Interactive games have served as AI testbeds since the rise of reinforcement learning and now anchor evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) and VisionLanguage Models (VLMs). Early LLM evaluations were text-only (Huang et al., 2024; Wu et al., 2023; Hu et al., 2024), effective for logical reasoning but lacking visual grounding. 2D-grid suites such as BALROG (Paglieri et al., 2024) and LVLMPlayground (Wang et al., 2025a) added spatial and 2