RevengeBench

Reverse Engineering Code-Space Policies from Behavioral Experiments

Babak Rahmani*  ·  Sebastian Dziadzio*  ·  Joschka Strüber*  ·  Sergio Hernández-Gutiérrez  ·  Matthias Bethge

Tübingen AI Center

(*) Equal contribution.

RevengeBench poses an inverse problem in code-space: given only behavioral traces of an opaque target agent acting in a programming-game arena, can a learner reconstruct a runnable program that reproduces the target's behavior? The benchmark is built on 75 LLM-generated, Elo-calibrated target policies across five arenas: BattleSnake, Halite, HuskyBench, RoboCode, and RobotRumble.

The protocol pairs passive observation with constrained active intervention. The learner watches the hidden target play sampled opponents and may author probe opponents: runnable policies whose interaction with the target induces new trajectories. A probe acts only through the normal gameplay channel and has no privileged access to target source or internal state. The learner submits one executable hypothesis, which is scored by action-distance on held-out target states and by downstream player-versus-player tournaments.

This public release keeps upstream CodeClash as a git submodule and places the RevengeBench-specific package in src/revenge_bench.

News

2026-07: RevengeBench was accepted to the Second Workshop on Agents in the Wild: Safety, Security, and Beyond (AIWILD) at ICML 2026. See the OpenReview page.

Installation

For the released Python package and CLI:

pip install revenge-bench
revenge-bench --help

The PyPI package includes the RevengeBench Python package, CLI entry points, benchmark configs, target pools, and lightweight scripts. For full benchmark reproduction and development from the source tree:

git clone --recurse-submodules <repo-url> revenge-bench
cd revenge-bench
uv venv .venv --python 3.11
source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install -e .

If you cloned without submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

You also need Docker, or Singularity/Apptainer with CODECLASH_RUNTIME set. Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the API keys for the LLM providers you plan to use.

Running The Benchmark

Main pool run:

bash scripts/run_pool.sh --seeds "42"

This iterates over configs/benchmark/<model>/<model>_<game>.yaml. Useful runner flags include --dry-run, --resume, --parallel N, --configs "name_a name_b", and --config-dir <dir>.

Public optional conditions and baselines use the same runner:

bash scripts/run_no_probe.sh --seeds "42"
bash scripts/run_nl_observation.sh --seeds "42"
bash scripts/run_bpi.sh --seeds "42"

Forward-PvP runs use the curated configs under configs/forward_pvp/:

bash scripts/run_forward_pvp.sh \
    --challengers "gpt5 gpt5-mini gpt-oss-120b grok-4.1-fast kimi-k2.6 deepseek-v3.2"

Optional Tracks

The main benchmark condition is active inverse-strategy recovery with probes. The public release also includes:

• configs/conditions/no_probe/: trace-only recovery with active probes disabled.
• configs/conditions/nl_observation/: recovery from LLM-generated natural-language summaries of traces.
• configs/baselines/bpi/: Bayesian Program Inference baseline configs.
• configs/forward_pvp/: downstream PvP configs comparing blind, recovered, and oracle opponent intelligence.

Paper-only plotting, history-compaction sweeps, reset-memory sweeps, and probe prompt ablation suites are intentionally not part of this release package.

Adding Target Policies

Create a directory under data/targets/<arena>/<policy_name>/ with a main.py implementing the arena's player API. See the existing target pools for examples.

Optional CodeClash target-pool generation helpers live under scripts/codeclash_strategies/. They can download CodeClash viewer artifacts, extract runnable strategies, validate them, and run Elo selection:

bash scripts/codeclash_strategies/build_pool.sh --game BattleSnake --count 40

Relationship To CodeClash

RevengeBench started from CodeClash and still relies on CodeClash's arena and execution abstractions. The upstream CodeClash source is preserved as a submodule in vendor/codeclash; RevengeBench-specific code lives in src/revenge_bench so the benchmark can evolve without modifying the vendored upstream tree.

Layout

revenge-bench/
├── vendor/codeclash/          # Upstream CodeClash submodule
├── src/revenge_bench/         # RevengeBench package
│   ├── arenas/                # Release arena wrappers/extensions
│   ├── tournaments/           # Inverse-strategy, Forward-PvP, and BPI tournaments
│   ├── agents/                # LLM agent wrappers
│   ├── traces/                # Per-arena trace parsers
│   └── scripts/               # Importable pipeline utilities
├── configs/
│   ├── benchmark/             # Main model x arena configs
│   ├── conditions/            # Public optional conditions: no-probe, NL observation
│   ├── baselines/             # Public baselines, including BPI
│   ├── prompts/               # Runtime prompt templates
│   └── forward_pvp/           # Forward-PvP configs
├── data/targets/              # Target policy pools
├── scripts/                   # Runtime and evaluation entry points
│   └── codeclash_strategies/  # Optional target-pool generation tooling
├── tests/
└── main.py                    # Compatibility entry point

Citation

@article{rahmani2026revengebench,
  title={RevengeBench: Reverse Engineering Code-Space Policies from Behavioral Experiments},
  author={Rahmani, Babak and Dziadzio, Sebastian and Str{\"u}ber, Joschka and Hern{\'a}ndez-Guti{\'e}rrez, Sergio and Bethge, Matthias},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.26094},
  year={2026}
}

License

This repository is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.