LUCA: A Synthetic World for Evaluating Experimental Reasoning in AI Agents

arXiv:2611.03100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An experimental agent can succeed for the wrong reasons. Evaluations, however, often focus on the outcome, not the experiments, evidence, and inferences that produced it. We introduce LUCA, a configurable synthetic world for evaluating this process under fully known ground truth. Agents learn unknown regulatory systems through budgeted experimentation, then predict unseen interventions, diagnose hidden faults, and attempt rescues. This setup allows us to evaluate experiment selection, prediction, diagnosis, and intervention separately. Across seven frontier LLMs and three baselines, these capabilities dissociate sharply. Agents frequently rescue malfunctioning systems while diagnosing the wrong fault; diagnosis varies 7x across models while prediction varies only 1.4x. Models also adopt surprisingly different experimental strategies, and greater exploration does not reliably yield better performance. In one failure mode, agents often perform the experiment needed to distinguish competing causes, but still fail to use the resulting evidence. LUCA turns these hidden failures into measurable behaviours, providing a controlled environment to study where experimental agents succeed and fail. Code: https://github.com/RelationRx/luca.