arXiv Machine Learning

Improving Sample Efficiency in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Simulated Football Games via Exploration

arXiv:2503. 13077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning cooperative behaviors in team-based environments.

arXiv AI
Jun 3

Human-Like Goalkeeping in a Realistic Football Simulation: a Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Approach

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.

By Alessandro Sestini, Joakim Bergdahl, Jean-Philippe Barrette-LaPierre, Florian Fuchs, Brady Chen, Fabio Zinno, Michael Jones, Linus Gissl\'en
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

LLM-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive NPC Behavior in Multi-Agent Combat Games

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.

By Hrithika Deepu Nair, Kayvan Karim
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Benchmarking the Limits of In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Ad-Hoc Teamwork

The paper introduces ICRL4AHT, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) in Ad-Hoc Teamwork (AHT) scenarios using Overcooked-V2. It provides a diverse teammate suite, a reproducible pipeline, and evaluates history-conditioned ICRL algorithms such as Algorithm Distillation and Decision-Pretrained Transformer. The results show that these methods often perform worse than random baselines and do not improve with longer horizons, underscoring the difficulty of strategic inference under partial observability in AHT.

By Yuheng Jing, Kai Li, Ziwen Zhang, Jiajun Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jiaxi Yang, Lei Zhang, Zhe Wu, Jinmin He, Junliang Xing, Jian Cheng
arXiv AI
Jun 2

MindGames Arena Generalization Track: In2AI Solution with Delayed Per-Step Reward Attribution

arXiv:2606. 00017v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training language model agents for multi-agent strategic interaction presents a core difficulty: the quality of any action may depend on future events that never materialize, on moves that violate game rules, or on decisions made by other players.

By Aliaksei Korshuk, Alexander Buyantuev, Ilya Makarov
arXiv AI
Sep 18

UnifiedPlayers: Enhance Tool-Integrated Reasoning in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

UnifiedPlayers is a cooperative framework that jointly adapts planning, execution, and evaluation for tool-integrated reinforcement learning agents. It consists of a Planning Player that generates tasks, an Execution Player that creates multi-turn trajectories with Python tool calls, and an Evaluation Player that builds executable verifiers, all coordinated by role‑specific rewards under GRPO. The approach outperforms prior baselines on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks and yields a verifier with high adversarial detection accuracy and more discriminative reward signals.

By Wenjie Liao, Liangjie Zhao, Zehong Cao