SimpleBlindAuction

Description

SimpleBlindAuction is an environment for evaluating agents on simultaneous sealed-bid auctions for multiple items. This environment wraps the SimpleBlindAuction implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Strategic resource allocation across multiple items
• Valuation and bidding under uncertainty
• Budget management and optimization
• Two-player competitive gameplay against an LLM opponent

Compute Requirements

SimpleBlindAuction does not require a sandbox. It has minimal compute requirements.

License

MIT.

Tasks

There are two splits: train (450 tasks) and test (450 tasks). Each split contains 50 tasks across each of 9 variants:

• SimpleBlindAuction-v0-quick
• SimpleBlindAuction-v0-quick-train
• SimpleBlindAuction-v0-quick-raw
• SimpleBlindAuction-v0
• SimpleBlindAuction-v0-train
• SimpleBlindAuction-v0-raw
• SimpleBlindAuction-v0-rich
• SimpleBlindAuction-v0-rich-train
• SimpleBlindAuction-v0-rich-raw

Each task is seeded for reproducibility.

Reward Structure

This is a sparse reward environment. Rewards are mapped from TextArena's native range of {-1, 0, 1} to {0.0, 0.5, 1.0} via (raw + 1) / 2.

We do not use LLM graders for this environment; reward is determined programmatically.

Data

Game state is generated procedurally by the TextArena engine using seeded randomness. No external data files are required.

Tools

Agents are given a single tool:

• place_bids(bids): Submit your bids for items in the auction. Format: '[Bid on Item X: amount]' for each item.

Time Horizon

SimpleBlindAuction is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

Moderate. SimpleBlindAuction requires strategic resource allocation, opponent modeling, and optimization under budget constraints across multiple simultaneous auctions.

Other Environment Requirements

This environment requires an OpenAI API key (passed via secrets) to power the LLM opponent.

Safety

Agents in SimpleBlindAuction interact only with an auction game and have no access to external systems, the internet, or sensitive data. The environment does not present safety risks.

Citations

@software{textarena2024,
  author    = {Guertler, Leon and Banting, Wilfried and Pignatelli, Eduardo},
  title     = {TextArena},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  url       = {https://github.com/LeonGuertler/TextArena}
}