Our Dota 2 result shows that self-play can catapult the performance of machine learning systems from far below human level to superhuman, given sufficient compute. In the span of a month, our system went from barely matching a high-ranked player to beating the top pros and has continued to improve since then.
We’ve created a bot which beats the world’s top professionals at 1v1 matches of Dota 2 under standard tournament rules. The bot learned the game from scratch by self-play, and does not use imitation learning or tree search.
We’ve found that self-play allows simulated AIs to discover physical skills like tackling, ducking, faking, kicking, catching, and diving for the ball, without explicitly designing an environment with these skills in mind. Self-play ensures that the environment is always the right difficulty for an AI to improve.
We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3. 4-month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had a 2-year doubling period)[^footnote-correction].
arXiv:2604. 02721v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Competitive programming remains one of the last few human strongholds in coding against AI.
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arXiv:2502. 08829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) with non-IID data often degrades client performance below local training baselines.
arXiv:2510. 23216v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While several high profile video games have served as testbeds for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), this technique has rarely been employed by the game industry for crafting authentic AI behaviors.
arXiv:2606. 20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters.
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:2606. 31270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computer-use agents, which leverage multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to operate computers and complete tasks, have attracted significant attention for their utility and versatility.
arXiv:2605. 14211v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon embodied tasks remain a fundamental challenge in AI, as current methods rely on hand-engineered rewards or action-labeled demonstrations, neither of which scales.