arXiv AI

Chess\_db: A framework for working with large chess game datasets

arXiv:2607. 21195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chess is a two player strategic game that is embedded in classical AI culture as it was once the frontier for intelligent behaviour.

arXiv AI
Sep 23

Synthesizing Reactive Character Behaviors for Continuous Games via Programmatic Policy Search

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.

By Maxim Gumin, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Victor Zordan, Daniel Ritchie
arXiv AI
6d ago

Game Arena: Strategic LLM Evaluation in Competitive Environments

Game Arena is an open, continuously expanding platform that evaluates large language models through competitive games, allowing head‑to‑head matchups in structured environments. Unlike static benchmarks, it prevents performance saturation by increasing gameplay difficulty as models improve. The report outlines the infrastructure and presents three pilot games—Chess, Poker, and Werewolf—covering perfect information, imperfect information, and multiplayer settings, and details evaluation metrics and competition results.

By Bovard Doerschuk-Tiberi, Yao Yan, Justin Chiu, Hann Wang, Timothy Chung, Martyna Plomecka, John Schultz, Jon Lipovetz, Clayton Drazner, Yuchen Zhuang, Jaimie Hwang, Nate Keating, Riley Jones, Andrew Lee, Oran Kelly, Ian Gemp, Michael Aaron, Laurel Prince, Kate Larson, Jeff Moser, Harrison Jobe, Chad Woodford, Siqi Liu, Andrew Wang, Bo Chang, Christopher D'Mello, Diane Chaleff, Addison Howard, Johnny Yip, Chuck Sugnet, Antonio Gulli, Meghan O'Connell, Will Cukierski, Nenad Tomasev, Dima Yeroshenko, Kinjal Parekh, Roxanne Daniel, Marc Lanctot, Domino Weir, Elsa Dong, Daniel Hennes, Melissa Nalubwama, Robert Fraser, Ryan Trostle, Jun Peng, Tom Mason, Lloyd Hightower, Chiamaka Chukwuka, Yuexiang Zhai, Phoebe Kirk, Yi Su, Yuting Han, Jie Ren, Chris Prichard, Sahand Sharifzadeh, Karim Hakimzadeh, DJ Sterling, Meg Risdal, Kate Olszewska, Ya Xu, Orhan Firat, Minmin Chen
arXiv AI
6d ago

Self-Play Search Distillation for Large Language Model Reasoning

Self-Play Search Distillation (SPSD) is a framework that generates superhuman synthetic data by having MuZero-like networks play board games in executable environments. The search records are converted into structured reasoning chains that serve as environment‑grounded supervision for training large language models. When applied to Qwen3‑4B‑Base, SPSD improves performance on six mathematics benchmarks from 24.1 to 36.6 and raises the win rate on unseen games from 15% to 45%.

By Lorenzo Molfetta, Wai-Chung Kwan, Giacomo Frisoni, Luca Ragazzi, Gianluca Moro, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Jeff Z. Pan, Pasquale Minervini
arXiv AI
Aug 14

DiG-bench: Discovery in Games

arXiv:2608. 12593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discovery---formulating novel generalizations---is a central part of the scientific process.

By Ruairidh M. Battleday, Kai Sandbrink, Jimi Cullen-Drohan, Zihan Yan, Timothy Muller, Clare Maguire, Ales Kubicek, Fraser Greenlee-Scott, Sukrit Sumant, Tri Dao, J\"urgen Schmidhuber, Michal Valko, Joshua Tenenbaum, Thomas L. Griffiths, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, James C. R. Whittington
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Clueing up LLMs with Tool-Augmented Deductive Reasoning

The paper introduces a text-based, multi-agent version of the board game Clue to test multi-step deductive reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Six LLM-based agents (GPT‑4o‑mini and Gemini‑2.5‑Flash) play turn‑based games, and a tool‑augmented approach uses a structured possibility matrix to convert implicit game state into explicit remaining possibilities, thereby offloading memory and deductive constraints from the agents. The study compares this tool‑augmented method against a baseline to assess its impact on reasoning quality and task success in a strategic reasoning environment.

By Rebecca Ansell, Autumn Toney-Wails
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Local Updates, Global Learning (LUGL): Playing Games with non-incremental Learners

The paper introduces LUGL (Local Updates, Global Learning), a framework that separates data collection from model fitting, allowing non‑incremental learners such as gradient‑boosted trees (LightGBM) to be used in reinforcement learning for games. LUGL alternates between a local update phase—where agents play self‑play games and store tabular updates—and a global learning phase—where a function approximator is trained on the accumulated table before it is reset. Experiments on both perfect‑information and imperfect‑information games show that LightGBM‑based agents perform competitively or better than neural‑network baselines like DQN and DeepCFR.

By David Milec, Spyridon Samothrakis, Michael Fairbank, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Local Updates, Global Learning (LUGL): Playing Games with non-incremental Learners

The paper introduces Local Updates, Global Learning (LUGL), a framework that separates data collection from model training, allowing non‑incremental learners such as gradient‑boosted trees (LightGBM) to be used in reinforcement learning for games. LUGL alternates between a local phase—where self‑play generates tabular updates—and a global phase—where these updates train a function approximator before resetting the table. Experiments on both perfect‑information and imperfect‑information games show that LightGBM agents perform competitively or better than neural‑network baselines like DQN and DeepCFR.