The paper investigates whether compact AI agents can display strategic behavior in poker under hidden information and whether preference optimization can surpass static and zero‑shot policies. After evaluating a static baseline and three frozen language models (SmallThinker, Qwen3, Gemma‑3), the authors introduce Strategic Preference Optimization with KL‑anchored Equilibrium (SPOKE), which blends teacher‑relative value penalties, policy anchoring, risk constraints, and structured rationale supervision. SPOKE outperforms other methods on Kuhn and Leduc games, achieving the lowest mean exploitability and the highest six‑max top‑1 agreement while maintaining teacher‑consistent behavior.
arXiv:2509. 23102v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the standard paradigm for aligning large language models with human preferences.
arXiv:2610.18354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Game-theoretic benchmarks claim that large language model (LLM) strategic decision-making varies across game types, interaction structures, and capabil...
arXiv:2609.07478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models act as strategic agents and models of human choice, yet choosing like a strategic agent does not mean computing like one. We reco...
arXiv:2608. 06741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning in large language models (LLMs) is often grounded in human text, human demonstrations, and human-generated rationales.
The paper explores a runtime strategy-selection framework where a large language model (LLM) guides a pre‑trained reinforcement learning (RL) policy for non‑player characters (NPCs) in a Unity combat game without altering the underlying policy. Five NPC agents sharing a PPO policy were compared in a baseline setup and an LLM‑augmented setup, where a locally hosted Mistral 7B model assigns one of four tactical tags every five seconds based on live game state. Across 600 episodes against three scripted opponents, the LLM‑augmented agents more than doubled their win rate against a Balanced opponent, improved performance against an Evasive opponent, but struggled against an Aggressive opponent due to over‑reliance on encirclement; analysis of 2,430 strategy selections revealed limited zero‑shot differentiation with the model favoring Surround in 83.8% of cases.
arXiv:2610.13995v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training large language models (LLMs) on two-player zero-sum games provides a verifiable reward, and the gains have been shown to transfer to ge...
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.
The paper presents a constrained command‑conditioned Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) executor for the MicroRTS real‑time strategy environment, enabling a single execution policy to follow diverse strategic commands. A Thompson‑sampling bandit strategist selects command tuples based on in‑game observations of the opponent’s strategy, rather than relying on opponent identity. In controlled experiments, the strategist‑executor system outperforms a flat PPO baseline against three of the four strongest opponents on a training map, including two held‑out opponents, while showing no significant difference against the remaining opponents.
arXiv:2608. 09586v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Independent Chip Model (ICM) converts tournament chips into reference prize equity, and policies are routinely constructed against those values.
arXiv:2608. 13810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We examine the interplay between ordinal, preference-based solution concepts in games and the long-run behavior of game dynamics, asking in particular to what extent the combinatorial data of a game -- its preference graph -- determine the outcomes of no-regret learning dynamics -- such as follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL).
The paper introduces Preference-based Opponent Shaping (PBOS), a method that incorporates a preference parameter into an agent’s loss function to directly consider an opponent’s loss during strategy updates. By jointly learning strategy and preference parameters, PBOS aims to guide agents toward cooperative or competitive behaviors without relying on simple opponent predictions. Experiments on differentiable games demonstrate that PBOS enables agents to achieve better reward distributions across various environments.
arXiv:2608. 14913v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the Open-Strategy Dictator Game (OSDG), a variant of the classic dictator game in which each player's strategy is a natural-language document visible to all participants.