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Creating Pro-Level AI for a Real-Time Fighting Game Using Deep Reinforcement Learning


Abstract:

Reinforcement learning (RL) combined with deep neural networks has performed remarkably well in many genres of games recently. It has surpassed human-level performance in...Show More

Abstract:

Reinforcement learning (RL) combined with deep neural networks has performed remarkably well in many genres of games recently. It has surpassed human-level performance in fixed game environments and turn-based two-player board games. However, to the best of our knowledge, current research has yet to produce a result that has surpassed human-level performance in modern complex fighting games. This is due to the inherent difficulties with real-time fighting games, including: vast action spaces, action dependencies, and imperfect information. We overcame these challenges and made 1v1 battle AI agents for the commercial game Blade and Soul. The trained agents competed against five professional gamers and achieved a winning rate of 62%. This article presents a practical RL method that includes a novel self-play curriculum and data skipping techniques. Through the curriculum, three different styles of agents were created by reward shaping and were trained against each other. Additionally, this article suggests data-skipping techniques that could increase data efficiency and facilitate explorations in vast spaces. Since our method can be generally applied to all two-player competitive games with vast action spaces, we anticipate its application to game development including level design and automated balancing.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Games ( Volume: 14, Issue: 2, June 2022)
Page(s): 212 - 220
Date of Publication: 06 January 2021

ISSN Information:


I. Introduction

Reinforcement learning (RL) is extending its boundaries to a variety of game genres. In player versus environment settings, such as those found in Atari 2600 games, RL agents have exceeded human level performance using various methods [5], [15], [16], [19]. Likewise, in player versus player (PVP) settings, neural networks combined with search-based methods beat the best human players in turn-based games with two or more players—such as Go, Chess [20], and Mahjong [28]. Recently, RL research in games has shifted focus to the PVP settings found in more complex video games such as StarCraft2 [24], Quake3 [10], and Dota2 [18]. Even grand-master level RL agents have been developed for StarCraft2 [29], which is a highly complex imperfect information game where an agent has to control multiple units at a time.

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