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Generative models for level generation have shown great potential in game production. However, they often provide limited control over the generation, and the validity of the generated levels is unreliable. Despite this fact, only a few approaches that learn from existing data provide the users with ways of controlling the generation, simultaneously addressing the generation of unsolvable levels. %One of the main challenges it faces is that levels generated through automation may not be solvable thus requiring validation. are not always engaging, challenging, or even solvable. This paper proposes Avalon, a novel method to improve models that learn from existing level designs using difficulty statistics extracted from gameplay. In particular, we use a conditional variational autoencoder to generate layouts for match-3 levels, conditioning the model on pre-collected statistics such as game mechanics like difficulty and relevant visual features like size and symmetry. Our method is general enough that multiple approaches could potentially be used to generate these statistics. We quantitatively evaluate our approach by comparing it to an ablated model without difficulty conditioning. Additionally, we analyze both quantitatively and qualitatively whether the style of the dataset is preserved in the generated levels. Our approach generates more valid levels than the same method without difficulty conditioning., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) is a promising approach to reduce the high sample complexity of traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) by eliminating the need for continuous environmental interactions. ORL exploits a dataset of pre-collected transitions and thus expands the range of application of RL to tasks in which the excessive environment queries increase training time and decrease efficiency, such as in modern AAA games. This paper introduces OfflineMania a novel environment for ORL research. It is inspired by the iconic TrackMania series and developed using the Unity 3D game engine. The environment simulates a single-agent racing game in which the objective is to complete the track through optimal navigation. We provide a variety of datasets to assess ORL performance. These datasets, created from policies of varying ability and in different sizes, aim to offer a challenging testbed for algorithm development and evaluation. We further establish a set of baselines for a range of Online RL, ORL, and hybrid Offline to Online RL approaches using our environment., Comment: Accepted at IEEE Conference on Games

In strategy games, one of the most important aspects of game design is maintaining a sense of challenge for players. Many mobile titles feature quick gameplay loops that allow players to progress steadily, requiring an abundance of levels and puzzles to prevent them from reaching the end too quickly. As with any content creation, testing and validation are essential to ensure engaging gameplay mechanics, enjoyable game assets, and playable levels. In this paper, we propose an automated approach that can be leveraged for gameplay testing and validation that combines traditional scripted methods with reinforcement learning, reaping the benefits of both approaches while adapting to new situations similarly to how a human player would. We test our solution on a popular tower defense game, Plants vs. Zombies. The results show that combining a learned approach, such as reinforcement learning, with a scripted AI produces a higher-performing and more robust agent than using only heuristic AI, achieving a 57.12% success rate compared to 47.95% in a set of 40 levels. Moreover, the results demonstrate the difficulty of training a general agent for this type of puzzle-like game., Comment: Published at CoG 2024

In games, and more generally in the field of software development, early detection of bugs is vital to maintain a high quality of the final product. Automated tests are a powerful tool that can catch a problem earlier in development by executing periodically. As an example, when new code is submitted to the code base, a new automated test verifies these changes. However, identifying the specific change responsible for a test failure becomes harder when dealing with batches of changes -- especially in the case of a large-scale project such as a AAA game, where thousands of people contribute to a single code base. This paper proposes a new approach to automatically identify which change in the code caused a test to fail. The method leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to associate error messages with the corresponding code changes causing the failure. We investigate the effectiveness of our approach with quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our approach reaches an accuracy of 71% in our newly created dataset, which comprises issues reported by developers at EA over a period of one year. We further evaluated our model through a user study to assess the utility and usability of the tool from a developer perspective, resulting in a significant reduction in time -- up to 60% -- spent investigating issues., Comment: Published at CoG 2024

Offline reinforcement learning leverages pre-collected datasets of transitions to train policies. It can serve as effective initialization for online algorithms, enhancing sample efficiency and speeding up convergence. However, when such datasets are limited in size and quality, offline pre-training can produce sub-optimal policies and lead to degraded online reinforcement learning performance. In this paper we propose a model-based data augmentation strategy to maximize the benefits of offline reinforcement learning pre-training and reduce the scale of data needed to be effective. Our approach leverages a world model of the environment trained on the offline dataset to augment states during offline pre-training. We evaluate our approach on a variety of MuJoCo robotic tasks and our results show it can jump-start online fine-tuning and substantially reduce - in some cases by an order of magnitude - the required number of environment interactions.

Imitation learning is an effective approach for training game-playing agents and, consequently, for efficient game production. However, generalization - the ability to perform well in related but unseen scenarios - is an essential requirement that remains an unsolved challenge for game AI. Generalization is difficult for imitation learning agents because it requires the algorithm to take meaningful actions outside of the training distribution. In this paper we propose a solution to this challenge. Inspired by the success of data augmentation in supervised learning, we augment the training data so the distribution of states and actions in the dataset better represents the real state-action distribution. This study evaluates methods for combining and applying data augmentations to observations, to improve generalization of imitation learning agents. It also provides a performance benchmark of these augmentations across several 3D environments. These results demonstrate that data augmentation is a promising framework for improving generalization in imitation learning agents., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

Reinforcement learning has been widely successful in producing agents capable of playing games at a human level. However, this requires complex reward engineering, and the agent's resulting policy is often unpredictable. Going beyond reinforcement learning is necessary to model a wide range of human playstyles, which can be difficult to represent with a reward function. This paper presents a novel imitation learning approach to generate multiple persona policies for playtesting. Multimodal Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (MultiGAIL) uses an auxiliary input parameter to learn distinct personas using a single-agent model. MultiGAIL is based on generative adversarial imitation learning and uses multiple discriminators as reward models, inferring the environment reward by comparing the agent and distinct expert policies. The reward from each discriminator is weighted according to the auxiliary input. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our technique in two environments with continuous and discrete action spaces., Comment: Published in CoG 2023

Going from research to production, especially for large and complex software systems, is fundamentally a hard problem. In large-scale game production, one of the main reasons is that the development environment can be very different from the final product. In this technical paper we describe an effort to add an experimental reinforcement learning system to an existing automated game testing solution based on scripted bots in order to increase its capacity. We report on how this reinforcement learning system was integrated with the aim to increase test coverage similar to [1] in a set of AAA games including Battlefield 2042 and Dead Space (2023). The aim of this technical paper is to show a use-case of leveraging reinforcement learning in game production and cover some of the largest time sinks anyone who wants to make the same journey for their game may encounter. Furthermore, to help the game industry to adopt this technology faster, we propose a few research directions that we believe will be valuable and necessary for making machine learning, and especially reinforcement learning, an effective tool in game production., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

This short paper presents an efficient path following solution for ground vehicles tailored to game AI. Our focus is on adapting established techniques to design simple solutions with parameters that are easily tunable for an efficient benchmark path follower. Our solution pays particular attention to computing a target speed which uses quadratic Bezier curves to estimate the path curvature. The performance of the proposed path follower is evaluated through a variety of test scenarios in a first-person shooter game, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in handling different types of paths and vehicles. We achieved a 70% decrease in the total number of stuck events compared to an existing path following solution., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to be published in IEEE Conference on Games 2023

In games, as in and many other domains, design validation and testing is a huge challenge as systems are growing in size and manual testing is becoming infeasible. This paper proposes a new approach to automated game validation and testing. Our method leverages a data-driven imitation learning technique, which requires little effort and time and no knowledge of machine learning or programming, that designers can use to efficiently train game testing agents. We investigate the validity of our approach through a user study with industry experts. The survey results show that our method is indeed a valid approach to game validation and that data-driven programming would be a useful aid to reducing effort and increasing quality of modern playtesting. The survey also highlights several open challenges. With the help of the most recent literature, we analyze the identified challenges and propose future research directions suitable for supporting and maximizing the utility of our approach., Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, and 3 tables

Focusing on Random Forests, we propose a multi-armed contextual bandit recommendation framework for feature-based selection of a single shallow tree of the learned ensemble. The trained system, which works on top of the Random Forest, dynamically identifies a base predictor that is responsible for providing the final output. In this way, we obtain local interpretations by observing the rules of the recommended tree. The carried out experiments reveal that our dynamic method is superior to an independent fitted CART decision tree and comparable to the whole black-box Random Forest in terms of predictive performances.

This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm to perform automatic analysis and detection of gameplay issues in complex 3D navigation environments. The Curiosity-Conditioned Proximal Trajectories (CCPT) method combines curiosity and imitation learning to train agents to methodically explore in the proximity of known trajectories derived from expert demonstrations. We show how CCPT can explore complex environments, discover gameplay issues and design oversights in the process, and recognize and highlight them directly to game designers. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm in a novel 3D navigation environment which reflects the complexity of modern AAA video games. Our results show a higher level of coverage and bug discovery than baselines methods, and it hence can provide a valuable tool for game designers to identify issues in game design automatically.

In this article we study the problem of training intelligent agents using Reinforcement Learning for the purpose of game development. Unlike systems built to replace human players and to achieve super-human performance, our agents aim to produce meaningful interactions with the player, and at the same time demonstrate behavioral traits as desired by game designers. We show how to combine distinct behavioral policies to obtain a meaningful "fusion" policy which comprises all these behaviors. To this end, we propose four different policy fusion methods for combining pre-trained policies. We further demonstrate how these methods can be used in combination with Inverse Reinforcement Learning in order to create intelligent agents with specific behavioral styles as chosen by game designers, without having to define many and possibly poorly-designed reward functions. Experiments on two different environments indicate that entropy-weighted policy fusion significantly outperforms all others. We provide several practical examples and use-cases for how these methods are indeed useful for video game production and designers.

Recent advances in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have largely focused on improving the performance of agents with the aim of replacing humans in known and well-defined environments. The use of these techniques as a game design tool for video game production, where the aim is instead to create Non-Player Character (NPC) behaviors, has received relatively little attention until recently. Turn-based strategy games like Roguelikes, for example, present unique challenges to DRL. In particular, the categorical nature of their complex game state, composed of many entities with different attributes, requires agents able to learn how to compare and prioritize these entities. Moreover, this complexity often leads to agents that overfit to states seen during training and that are unable to generalize in the face of design changes made during development. In this paper we propose two network architectures which, when combined with a \emph{procedural loot generation} system, are able to better handle complex categorical state spaces and to mitigate the need for retraining forced by design decisions. The first is based on a dense embedding of the categorical input space that abstracts the discrete observation model and renders trained agents more able to generalize. The second proposed architecture is more general and is based on a Transformer network able to reason relationally about input and input attributes. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that new agents have better adaptation capacity with respect to a baseline architecture, making this framework more robust to dynamic gameplay changes during development. Based on the results shown in this paper, we believe that these solutions represent a step forward towards making DRL more accessible to the gaming industry., Comment: Presented at the AAAI-21 Workshop on Reinforcement Learning in Games

Deep Reinforcement Learning achieves very good results in domains where reward functions can be manually engineered. At the same time, there is growing interest within the community in using games based on Procedurally Content Generation (PCG) as benchmark environments since this type of environment is perfect for studying overfitting and generalization of agents under domain shift. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) can instead extrapolate reward functions from expert demonstrations, with good results even on high-dimensional problems, however there are no examples of applying these techniques to procedurally-generated environments. This is mostly due to the number of demonstrations needed to find a good reward model. We propose a technique based on Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning which can significantly decrease the need for expert demonstrations in PCG games. Through the use of an environment with a limited set of initial seed levels, plus some modifications to stabilize training, we show that our approach, DE-AIRL, is demonstration-efficient and still able to extrapolate reward functions which generalize to the fully procedural domain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique on two procedural environments, MiniGrid and DeepCrawl, for a variety of tasks., Comment: Presented at the AAAI-21 Workshop on Reinforcement Learning in Games

In this paper we introduce DeepCrawl, a fully-playable Roguelike prototype for iOS and Android in which all agents are controlled by policy networks trained using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Our aim is to understand whether recent advances in DRL can be used to develop convincing behavioral models for non-player characters in videogames. We begin with an analysis of requirements that such an AI system should satisfy in order to be practically applicable in video game development, and identify the elements of the DRL model used in the DeepCrawl prototype. The successes and limitations of DeepCrawl are documented through a series of playability tests performed on the final game. We believe that the techniques we propose offer insight into innovative new avenues for the development of behaviors for non-player characters in video games, as they offer the potential to overcome critical issues with, Comment: Presented at AIIDE-19 Workshop on Experimental Artificial Intelligence in Games