AstroAgentBench: Evaluating Agentic Planning on Space Mission Planning Tasks

Weiyi Wang, Xinchi Chen, Jingjing Gong, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu


Abstract
Recent LLM-for-Space systems address mission planning, scheduling, operations support, simulator control, and autonomy, but their evaluations use different task contracts, control settings, simulators, and success criteria. We introduce AstroAgentBench, a seven-family benchmark for executable space mission planning in the domains of scheduling, observation planning, constellation design, and relay support. For each case, an agent submits a planning artifact that is checked by an external verifier for schema, timing, geometry, resources, and mission value. Results report validity and normalized scores, with comparisons to task-specific solver references. Across five LLM agent systems and 35 held-out cases, the strongest systems approach or exceed solver-reference scores on several families, while weaker systems often fail to produce high-value valid plans and even strong systems lose quality on geometric, product-level, or design-heavy tasks. Trace analyses separate two failure points: task-contract misformulation and weak solution construction. Successful runs instead calibrate agent-written implementations against verifier feedback and adapt search to case-specific structure. Ablations show that procedure injection and memory accumulation help selectively, when they supply the missing formulation, calibration, or search support.
Anthology ID:
2026.aacl-long.72
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1561–1590
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.72/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weiyi Wang, Xinchi Chen, Jingjing Gong, Xuanjing Huang, and Xipeng Qiu. 2026. AstroAgentBench: Evaluating Agentic Planning on Space Mission Planning Tasks. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1561–1590, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AstroAgentBench: Evaluating Agentic Planning on Space Mission Planning Tasks (Wang et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.72.pdf