The paper proposes a method that mimics human cognition to train reinforcement learning agents to generate explainable strategies and policies as executable procedures derived from sequences of gameplay actions. It demonstrates automatic learning of such programs for chess and a grid‑based environment, showing that the resulting strategies produce effective actions and can be learned from gameplay data.
The paper presents a symbolic sub‑policy model for chess that incorporates domain knowledge to improve interpretability. By adapting patterns learned through inductive logic programming (PAL), the authors evaluate the model using a divergence metric against a random baseline and show that it can suggest moves comparable to a human beginner. They also propose a computational evaluation scheme that augments an existing engine with their model.
arXiv:2607. 27574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has emerged in large language models as a lightweight alternative for dynamically changing a model's behavior at inference time.
arXiv:2610.17391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Amazing breakthroughs in reinforcement learning have taken place. Computers teach themselves to play Chess and Go and beat world champions. There is ta...
arXiv:2510. 11503v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Games have long been a microcosm for studying planning and reasoning in both natural and artificial intelligence (AI), often focusing on expert-level or even super-human play.
arXiv:2404. 02039v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game environments provide rich, controllable settings that stimulate many aspects of real-world complexity.
Policy Learning with a Language Bottleneck (PLLB) is a framework that lets AI agents generate linguistic rules to describe high‑level strategies. PLLB alternates between rule generation, guided by language models, and policy updates that use these rules, even when a single rule cannot fully capture a complex policy. Experiments on five tasks—including a signaling game, maze navigation, image reconstruction, and robot grasp planning—show that PLLB agents learn more interpretable, generalizable behaviors and can share rules with humans for better coordination.
The paper introduces a method for creating reactive character behaviors in continuous games as compact, human‑readable programs. It searches over a domain‑specific language that uses reactive geometric decisions and higher‑order constructs to discretize continuous behavior space, while eliminating redundant program forms through synthesis antipatterns. The approach, called agentic sketching, combines bottom‑up symbolic enumeration with top‑down guidance from a coding agent, and outperforms either technique alone on a benchmark of 14 continuous games.
The paper introduces an automatic metric for evaluating chess explanations based on chess-engine evaluations and finds that current language models perform poorly, relying on surface-level observations. It presents BinProp, a training-free method that helps models discover reusable chess concepts, significantly improving explainability across multiple models. BinProp also generalizes to other board games such as Go, draughts, and shogi without extra tuning.
Learn2Play Bench is a new benchmark that tests how well large language model agents learn from experience in unfamiliar, text‑based games with novel or counterintuitive rules. The benchmark provides reproducible feedback, automatic scoring, and varied game instances to evaluate learning across repeated attempts and transfer to new situations. Findings show that retaining full action records aids learning, human players outperform agents, and the choice of harness significantly impacts performance and inference cost.
arXiv:2608. 07490v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are increasingly evaluated through games, but most benchmarks emphasize final outcomes rather than how players learn from repeated interaction.
The paper presents UBCL, a reinforcement learning framework that generates controllable and diverse player behaviors without using human gameplay data. By defining behavior in an N‑dimensional continuous space and training a single PPO‑based multi‑agent policy with target behavior vectors, the method learns how actions affect behavioral statistics such as aggressiveness, mobility, and cooperativeness. Experiments in a custom Unity multiplayer game demonstrate that UBCL achieves greater behavioral diversity than a win‑only baseline and accurately matches specified behavior vectors across a range of targets.