We introduce a reinforcement learning environment based on Heroic - Magic Duel, a 1 v 1 action strategy game. This domain is non-trivial for several reasons: it is a real-time game, the state space is large, the information given to the player before and at each step of a match is imperfect, and distribution of actions is dynamic. Our main contribution is a deep reinforcement learning agent playing the game at a competitive level that we trained using PPO and self-play with multiple competing agents, employing only a simple reward of $\pm 1$ depending on the outcome of a single match. Our best self-play agent, obtains around $65\%$ win rate against the existing AI and over $50\%$ win rate against a top human player.
In this paper, we present a new methodology that employs tester agents to automate video game testing. We introduce two types of agents -synthetic and human-like- and two distinct approaches to create them. Our agents are derived from Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) agents, but focus on finding defects. The synthetic agent uses test goals generated from game scenarios, and these goals are further modified to examine the effects of unintended game transitions. The human-like agent uses test goals extracted by our proposed multiple greedy-policy inverse reinforceme…
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) is one of the most played game genres nowadays. With the increasing growth of this genre, it becomes necessary to develop effective intelligent agents to play alongside or against human players. In this paper we address the problem of agent development for MOBA games. We implement a two-layered architecture agent that handles both navigation and game mechanics. This architecture relies on the use of Influence Maps, a widely used approach for tactical analysis. Several experiments were performed using {\em League of Legends} as a testbed, and show promisin…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
This paper introduces a simple and fast variant of Planet Wars as a test-bed for statistical planning based Game AI agents, and for noisy hyper-parameter optimisation. Planet Wars is a real-time strategy game with simple rules but complex game-play. The variant introduced in this paper is designed for speed to enable efficient experimentation, and also for a fixed action space to enable practical inter-operability with General Video Game AI agents. If we treat the game as a win-loss game (which is standard), then this leads to challenging noisy optimisation problems both in tuning agents to pl…
University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Most games have, or can be generalised to have, a number of parameters that may be varied in order to provide instances of games that lead to very different player experiences. The space of possible parameter settings can be seen as a search space, and we can therefore use a Random Mutation Hill Climbing algorithm or other search methods to find the parameter settings that induce the best games. One of the hardest parts of this approach is defining a suitable fitness function. In this paper we explore the possibility of using one of a growing set of General Video Game AI agents to perform auto…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is applied in safety-critical domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. It achieves superhuman abilities in many tasks, however whether DRL agents can be shown to act safely is an open problem. Atari games are a simple yet challenging exemplar for evaluating the safety of DRL agents and feature a diverse portfolio of game mechanics. The safety of neural agents has been studied before using methods that either require a model of the system dynamics or an abstraction; unfortunately, these are unsuitable to Atari games because their low-level dynamics are …
National University of Tainan（台南大学）；Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Haifong Weiqi Academy（海峰围棋学院）
In this paper, we demonstrate the application of Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) to construct an FML-based Dynamic Assessment Agent (FDAA), and we present an FML-based Human-Machine Cooperative System (FHMCS) for the game of Go. The proposed FDAA comprises an intelligent decision-making and learning mechanism, an intelligent game bot, a proximal development agent, and an intelligent agent. The intelligent game bot is based on the open-source code of Facebook Darkforest, and it features a representational state transfer application programming interface mechanism. The proximal development agent con…
Board games, with the exception of solo games, need at least one other player to play. Because of this, we created Artificial Intelligent (AI) agents to play against us when an opponent is missing. These AI agents are created in a number of ways, but one challenge with these agents is that an agent can have superior ability compared to us. In this work, we describe how to create weaker AI agents that play board games. We use Tic-Tac-Toe, Nine-Men's Morris, and Mancala, and our technique uses a Reinforcement Learning model where an agent uses the Q-learning algorithm to learn these games. We sh…
New York University（纽约大学）；Game Innovation Lab（游戏创新实验室）；Electronic Arts（美国艺电公司）
The process of playtesting a game is subjective, expensive and incomplete. In this paper, we present a playtesting approach that explores the game space with automated agents and collects data to answer questions posed by the designers. Rather than have agents interacting with an actual game client, this approach recreates the bare bone mechanics of the game as a separate system. Our agent is able to play in minutes what would take testers days of organic gameplay. The analysis of thousands of game simulations exposed imbalances in game actions, identified inconsequential rewards and evaluated…
Game tree search algorithms such as minimax have been used with enormous success in turn-based adversarial games such as Chess or Checkers. However, such algorithms cannot be directly applied to real-time strategy (RTS) games because a number of reasons. For example, minimax assumes a turn-taking game mechanics, not present in RTS games. In this paper we present RTMM, a real-time variant of the standard minimax algorithm, and discuss its applicability in the context of RTS games. We discuss its strengths and weaknesses, and evaluate it in two real-time games.
This paper discusses the effects of social learning in training of game playing agents. The training of agents in a social context instead of a self-play environment is investigated. Agents that use the reinforcement learning algorithms are trained in social settings. This mimics the way in which players of board games such as scrabble and chess mentor each other in their clubs. A Round Robin tournament and a modified Swiss tournament setting are used for the training. The agents trained using social settings are compared to self play agents and results indicate that more robust agents emerge …
Indian Institute Of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）
Text-based games are suitable test-beds for designing agents that can learn by interaction with the environment in the form of natural language text. Very recently, deep reinforcement learning based agents have been successfully applied for playing text-based games. In this paper, we explore the possibility of designing a single agent to play several text-based games and of expanding the agent's vocabulary using the vocabulary of agents trained for multiple games. To this extent, we explore the application of recently proposed policy distillation method for video games to the text-based game s…
Real Time Strategy (RTS) games require macro strategies as well as micro strategies to obtain satisfactory performance since it has large state space, action space, and hidden information. This paper presents a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning model for mastering Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, a sub-genre of RTS games. The novelty of this work are: (1) proposing a hierarchical framework, where agents execute macro strategies by imitation learning and carry out micromanipulations through reinforcement learning, (2) developing a simple self-learning method to get better s…
Stochastic games provide a framework for interactions among multiple agents and enable a myriad of applications. In these games, agents decide on actions simultaneously, the state of every agent moves to the next state, and each agent receives a reward. However, finding an equilibrium (if exists) in this game is often difficult when the number of agents becomes large. This paper focuses on finding a mean-field equilibrium (MFE) in an action coupled stochastic game setting in an episodic framework. It is assumed that the impact of the other agents' can be assumed by the empirical distribution o…
Computer Science Institute TH K \"o ln -- Cologne University of Applied Sciences Gummersbach, Germany
We present a new general board game (GBG) playing and learning framework. GBG defines the common interfaces for board games, game states and their AI agents. It allows one to run competitions of different agents on different games. It standardizes those parts of board game playing and learning that otherwise would be tedious and repetitive parts in coding. GBG is suitable for arbitrary 1-, 2-, ..., N-player board games. It makes a generic TD($λ$)-n-tuple agent for the first time available to arbitrary games. On various games, TD($λ$)-n-tuple is found to be superior to other generic agents like…
Naval Center for Applied Research in A.I.（海军应用人工智能中心）；U.S. Naval Research Laboratory（美国海军研究实验室）；Oberlin College（欧柏林学院）
Reinforcement learning (RL) is successful at learning to play games where the entire environment is visible. However, RL approaches are challenged in complex games like Starcraft II and in real-world environments where the entire environment is not visible. In these more complex games with more limited visual information, agents must choose where to look and how to optimally use their limited visual information in order to succeed at the game. We verify that with a relatively simple model the agent can learn where to look in scenarios with a limited visual bandwidth. We develop a method for ma…
Stratega, a general strategy games framework, has been designed to foster research on computational intelligence for strategy games. In contrast to other strategy game frameworks, Stratega allows to create a wide variety of turn-based and real-time strategy games using a common API for agent development. While the current version supports the development of turn-based strategy games and agents, we will add support for real-time strategy games in future updates. Flexibility is achieved by utilising YAML-files to configure tiles, units, actions, and levels. Therefore, the user can design and run…
Game agents such as opponents, non-player characters, and teammates are central to player experiences in many modern games. As the landscape of AI techniques used in the games industry evolves to adopt machine learning (ML) more widely, it is vital that the research community learn from the best practices cultivated within the industry over decades creating agents. However, although commercial game agent creation pipelines are more mature than those based on ML, opportunities for improvement still abound. As a foundation for shared progress identifying research opportunities between researcher…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
General Video Game Playing (GVGP) aims at designing an agent that is capable of playing multiple video games with no human intervention. In 2014, The General Video Game AI (GVGAI) competition framework was created and released with the purpose of providing researchers a common open-source and easy to use platform for testing their AI methods with potentially infinity of games created using Video Game Description Language (VGDL). The framework has been expanded into several tracks during the last few years to meet the demand of different research directions. The agents are required either to pl…
DVM: Towards Controllable LLM Agents in Social Deduction Games
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Netease Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
The development of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has benefited from the emergency of a variety type of game environments where new challenging problems are proposed and new algorithms can be tested safely and quickly, such as Board games, RTS, FPS, and MOBA games. However, many existing environments lack complexity and flexibility and assume the actions are synchronously executed in multi-agent settings, which become less valuable. We introduce the Fever Basketball game, a novel reinforcement learning environment where agents are trained to play basketball game. It is a complex and challen…
In this paper, we address the problem of creating believable agents (virtual characters) in video games. We consider only one meaning of believability, ``giving the feeling of being controlled by a player'', and outline the problem of its evaluation. We present several models for agents in games which can produce believable behaviours, both from industry and research. For high level of believability, learning and especially imitation learning seems to be the way to go. We make a quick overview of different approaches to make video games' agents learn from players. To conclude we propose a two-…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；RealAI（瑞莱智慧）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved super-human performance on complex video games (e.g., StarCraft II and Dota II). However, current DRL systems still suffer from challenges of multi-agent coordination, sparse rewards, stochastic environments, etc. In seeking to address these challenges, we employ a football video game, e.g., Google Research Football (GRF), as our testbed and develop an end-to-end learning-based AI system (denoted as TiKick) to complete this challenging task. In this work, we first generated a large replay dataset from the self-playing of single-agent experts, whic…
A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Social Agents in Game-Theoretic Scenarios
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局信息通信研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta（马耳他大学数字游戏研究所）
While artificial intelligence has been applied to control players' decisions in board games for over half a century, little attention is given to games with no player competition. Pandemic is an exemplar collaborative board game where all players coordinate to overcome challenges posed by events occurring during the game's progression. This paper proposes an artificial agent which controls all players' actions and balances chances of winning versus risk of losing in this highly stochastic environment. The agent applies a Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithm on an abstraction of the game-stat…
Digital games have become a key player in the entertainment industry, attracting millions of new players each year. In spite of that, novice players may have a hard time when playing certain types of games, such as MOBAs and MMORPGs, due to their steep learning curves and not so friendly online communities. In this paper, we present an approach to help novice players in MOBA games overcome these problems. An artificial intelligence agent plays alongside the player analyzing his/her performance and giving tips about the game. Experiments performed with the game {\em League of Legends} show the …
Experience-Sensitive Game Learning: A Behavioral Study of Humans and Language Agents
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Georgetown University（乔治城大学）；INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”（索菲亚大学“圣·克利门特·奥赫里德斯基”分校INSAIT）
We propose novel methods to develop action controllable agent that behaves like a human and has the ability to align with human players in Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games. By modeling the control problem as an action generation process, we devise a deep latent alignment neural network model for training agent, and a corresponding sampling algorithm for controlling an agent's action. Particularly, we propose deterministic and stochastic attention implementations of the core latent alignment model. Both simulated and online experiments in the game Honor of Kings demonstrate the effi…
GameXpert-Bench: How Far Are Coding Agents from Expert Game Development?
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Lightspeed Studios, Tencent（腾讯光速工作室）
We present TorchCraft, a library that enables deep learning research on Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games such as StarCraft: Brood War, by making it easier to control these games from a machine learning framework, here Torch. This white paper argues for using RTS games as a benchmark for AI research, and describes the design and components of TorchCraft.
GameReplica: A Benchmark for Black-Box Visual Game Replication by Vision-Language Agents
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；Xiaomi EV（小米汽车）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）
The next challenge of game AI lies in Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. RTS games provide partially observable gaming environments, where agents interact with one another in an action space much larger than that of GO. Mastering RTS games requires both strong macro strategies and delicate micro level execution. Recently, great progress has been made in micro level execution, while complete solutions for macro strategies are still lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based Hierarchical Macro Strategy model for mastering MOBA games, a sub-genre of RTS games. Trained by the Hierarchi…
New York University（纽约大学）；University of Malta（马耳他大学）
This paper introduces DATA Agent, a system which creates murder mystery adventures from open data. In the game, the player takes on the role of a detective tasked with finding the culprit of a murder. All characters, places, and items in DATA Agent games are generated using open data as source content. The paper discusses the general game design and user interface of DATA Agent, and provides details on the generative algorithms which transform linked data into different game objects. Findings from a user study with 30 participants playing through two games of DATA Agent show that the game is e…
Research concerning organization and coordination within multi-agent systems continues to draw from a variety of architectures and methodologies. The work presented in this paper combines techniques from game theory and multi-agent systems to produce self-organizing, polymorphic, lightweight, embedded agents for systems scheduling within a large-scale real-time systems environment. Results show how this approach is used to experimentally produce optimum real-time scheduling through the emergent behavior of thousands of agents. These results are obtained using a SWARM simulation of systems sche…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
With the recent advances in solving large, zero-sum extensive form games, there is a growing interest in the inverse problem of inferring underlying game parameters given only access to agent actions. Although a recent work provides a powerful differentiable end-to-end learning frameworks which embed a game solver within a deep-learning framework, allowing unknown game parameters to be learned via backpropagation, this framework faces significant limitations when applied to boundedly rational human agents and large scale problems, leading to poor practicality. In this paper, we address these l…
Ganzfried Research（甘茨弗里德研究公司）；Florida International University（佛罗里达国际大学）
Creating strong agents for games with more than two players is a major open problem in AI. Common approaches are based on approximating game-theoretic solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium, which have strong theoretical guarantees in two-player zero-sum games, but no guarantees in non-zero-sum games or in games with more than two players. We describe an agent that is able to defeat a variety of realistic opponents using an exact Nash equilibrium strategy in a 3-player imperfect-information game. This shows that, despite a lack of theoretical guarantees, agents based on Nash equilibrium st…
Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a powerful paradigm to gain insight into social phenomena. One area that ABM has rarely been applied is coalition formation. Traditionally, coalition formation is modeled using cooperative game theory. In this paper, a heuristic algorithm is developed that can be embedded into an ABM to allow the agents to find coalition. The resultant coalition structures are comparable to those found by cooperative game theory solution approaches, specifically, the core. A heuristic approach is required due to the computational complexity of finding a cooperative game theory sol…
