PokaiTrainer is a competitive Pokémon VGC agent that scales belief‑state search to handle simultaneous, large joint action spaces and stochastic outcomes. The system uses PokaiEngine, a Rust battle engine that efficiently enumerates joint action outcomes with high accuracy, and adapts Student of Games to solve each decision as a Bayesian matrix game under a compute budget. In live Showdown play, the agent achieved a 59% win rate against a human field averaging ~1320 Elo, reaching an Elo band of 1350‑1400 and briefly entering the top 500 of the format.
arXiv:2609.06816v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision-time search in perfect and imperfect information games with enumerable belief states are effective methods for game AI. Collectible card games...
The paper introduces Regret-Weighted Payoff Sampling (RWPS), a budgeted estimator that selectively simulates only payoff-matrix cells relevant to a Nash equilibrium and uses a surrogate model for the remaining entries. RWPS provides an instance-dependent error bound weighted by the opponent’s equilibrium mixture and a coverage result guaranteeing that, once the deviation-relevant set is simulated, surrogate error does not affect either player’s regret. Experiments on three 21×21 general-sum games, including an asymmetric Colonel Blotto, show that RWPS achieves four to six times tighter bounds than previous methods and outperforms other sampling strategies on the CyGym and ANSG cyber simulators at low budgets.
arXiv:2511. 22581v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that in any Dec-POMDP, sufficiently high entropy regularization ensures that the policy gradient flow with tabular softmax parametrization always converges, for any initialization, to the same joint policy, and that this joint policy is equivariant w.
arXiv:2607. 06854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning agents for imperfect-information card games are only as strong as the opponents they train against, and they are hard to grade, since they beat a random opponent over 99 percent of the time and only tie copies of themselves.
arXiv:2607. 05904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training a language model against its own reference-free judgments (the premise of self-rewarding, self-play, and LLM-as-a-judge pipelines) assumes a model's verdict on a shown answer tracks correctness.
arXiv:2608.27757v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Searchless chess networks reach human master strength from a single forward pass by imitating a stronger teacher: the strongest, Leela Chess Zero's (Lc...
arXiv:2610.00902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: One way to make AI systems safe is to shape what the system is: its objective and dispositions. We take a complementary route: treat the agents' char...
The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.
arXiv:2608. 09902v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Dark Souls Learning Environment (DSLE), a containerized platform that presents all 22 boss encounters of Dark Souls: Remastered as game-playing agent benchmarks through a Gymnasium-style interface.
arXiv:2607. 29577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Games and simulators make valuable benchmarks by turning decisions into measurable outcomes, but many current suites under-test rules-rich tactical reasoning: the ability to choose well when geometry, timing, resources, objectives, and rule interactions all matter at once.
We introduce the Dark Souls Learning Environment (DSLE), a containerized platform that presents all 22 boss encounters of Dark Souls: Remastered as game-playing agent benchmarks through a Gymnasium-style interface. DSLE combines real-time combat, high-dimensional visual input, and sparse terminal rewards, with each environment step being a real action executed against the running game.
The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) struggle in strategic decision-making under incomplete information. It identifies two key gaps: an observation‑belief gap where LLMs’ internal representations of game states are accurate but brittle, and a belief‑action gap where converting these internal beliefs into actions is weak, leading to suboptimal payoffs. Experiments with Llama 3.1, Qwen3, and gpt‑oss confirm that acting optimally on decoded beliefs would improve outcomes in most games, highlighting a bottleneck in belief‑to‑action conversion.