Benchmarking LLMs' Swarm intelligence
Authors: name: Kai Ruan; name: Mowen Huang; name: Ji-Rong Wen; name: Hao Sun
Published: 2025-05-07 12:32:01

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for complex reasoning, yet their
capacity for emergent coordination in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) when operating
under strict constraints-such as limited local perception and communication,
characteristic of natural swarms-remains largely unexplored, particularly
concerning the nuances of swarm intelligence. Existing benchmarks often do not
fully capture the unique challenges of decentralized coordination that arise
when agents operate with incomplete spatio-temporal information. To bridge this
gap, we introduce SwarmBench, a novel benchmark designed to systematically
evaluate the swarm intelligence capabilities of LLMs acting as decentralized
agents. SwarmBench features five foundational MAS coordination tasks within a
configurable 2D grid environment, forcing agents to rely primarily on local
sensory input (k x k view) and local communication. We propose metrics for
coordination effectiveness and analyze emergent group dynamics. Evaluating
several leading LLMs in a zero-shot setting, we find significant performance
variations across tasks, highlighting the difficulties posed by local
information constraints. While some coordination emerges, results indicate
limitations in robust planning and strategy formation under uncertainty in
these decentralized scenarios. Assessing LLMs under swarm-like conditions is
crucial for realizing their potential in future decentralized systems. We
release SwarmBench as an open, extensible toolkit-built upon a customizable and
scalable physical system with defined mechanical properties. It provides
environments, prompts, evaluation scripts, and the comprehensive experimental
datasets generated, aiming to foster reproducible research into LLM-based MAS
coordination and the theoretical underpinnings of Embodied MAS. Our code
repository is available at https://github.com/x66ccff/swarmbench.