Exploiting Opponent Modeling For Learning In Multi-agent Adversarial Games

An issue with learning effective policies in multi-agent adversarial games is that the size of the search space can be prohibitively large when the actions of both teammates and opponents are considered simultaneously. Opponent modeling, predicting an opponent’s actions in advance of execution, is one approach for selecting actions in adversarial settings, but it is often performed in an ad hoc way. In this dissertation, we introduce several methods for using opponent modeling, in the form of predictions about the players’ physical movements, to learn team policies. To explore the problem of decision-making in multi-agent adversarial scenarios, we use our approach for both offline play generation and real-time team response in the Rush 2008 American football simulator. Simultaneously predicting the movement trajectories, future reward, and play strategies of multiple players in real-time is a daunting task but we illustrate how it is possible to divide and conquer this problem with an assortment of data-driven models. By leveraging spatio-temporal traces of player movements, we learn discriminative models of defensive play for opponent modeling. With the reward information from previous play matchups, we use a modified version of UCT (Upper Conference Bounds applied to Trees) to create new offensive plays and to learn play repairs to counter predicted opponent actions. iii In team games, players must coordinate effectively to accomplish tasks while foiling their opponents either in a preplanned or emergent manner. An effective team policy must generate the necessary coordination, yet considering all possibilities for creating coordinating subgroups is computationally infeasible. Automatically identifying and preserving the coordination between key subgroups of teammates can make search more productive by pruning policies that disrupt these relationships. We demonstrate that combining opponent modeling with automatic subgroup identification can be used to create team policies with a higher average yardage than either the baseline game or domain-specific heuristics

On the automated interpretation and indexing of American football

This work combines natural language understanding and image processing with incremental learning to develop a system that can automatically interpret and index American Football. We have developed a model for representing spatio-temporal characteristics of multiple objects in dynamic scenes in this domain. Our representation combines expert knowledge, domain knowledge, spatial knowledge and temporal knowledge. We also present an incremental learning algorithm to improve the knowledge base as well as to keep previously developed concepts consistent with new data. The advantages of the incremental learning algorithm are that is that it does not split concepts and it generates a compact conceptual hierarchy which does not store instances

Spartan Daily, September 4, 1981

Volume 77, Issue 5https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6780/thumbnail.jp

Play type recognition in real-world football video

This paper presents a vision system for recognizing the sequence of plays in amateur videos of American football games (e.g. offense, defense, kickoff, punt, etc). The sys-tem is aimed at reducing user effort in annotating foot-ball videos, which are posted on a web service used by over 13,000 high school, college, and professional football teams. Recognizing football plays is particularly challeng-ing in the context of such a web service, due to the huge variations across videos, in terms of camera viewpoint, mo-tion, distance from the field, as well as amateur camerawork quality, and lighting conditions, among other factors. Given a sequence of videos, where each shows a particular play of a football game, we first run noisy play-level detectors on every video. Then, we integrate responses of the play-level detectors with global game-level reasoning which accounts for statistical knowledge about football games. Our empir-ical results on more than 1450 videos from 10 diverse foot-ball games show that our approach is quite effective, and close to being usable in a real-world setting. 1

Relationships Among A Football Specific Test, Wonderlic Test And Decision-Making In NCAA Football Players

Aim. This study compared two different evaluation methods of cognitive ability (Wonderlic and a Football Test) and their relationships to Assign Grade (accuracy of their decision making on the football field). Methods. Thirty-seven NCAA football players were given both tests, separated by several weeks. Additionally, the football coaches graded the players’ decision making performance with an “Assign Grade,” an evaluation of the players’ ability to make the correct decisions on the field. Results. Spearman rho correlation coefficient showed no significant correlations between the Wonderlic Personnel Test and Assign Grade (r = 0.04, p = 0.82) for any of the groups or player positions. Correlations were higher for the Football Test and Assign Grade (r = 0.30, p = 0.07), and a positive result was found for the Football Test and Assign Grade (r = 0.46, p = 0.04), when the specific positions were categorized as “more cognitive demanding.” Conclusion. There should be more research done to understand the cognitive demands of playing football and type of tests best predict performance

Using Geographic Information to Explore Player-Specific Movement and its Effects on Play Success in the NFL

American Football is a billion-dollar industry in the United States. The analytical aspect of the sport is an ever-growing domain, with open-source competitions like the NFL Big Data Bowl accelerating this growth. With the amount of player movement during each play, tracking data can prove valuable in many areas of football analytics. While concussion detection, catch recognition, and completion percentage prediction are all existing use cases for this data, player-specific movement attributes, such as speed and agility, may be helpful in predicting play success. This research calculates player-specific speed and agility attributes from tracking data and supplements them with descriptive factors to produce a quality data set that, with machine learning models, can lead to accurate predictions of success on a play-by-play basis. A neural network was trained to predict play success with an F1 score of 40%. Therefore, the true effect of the inclusion of player movement attributes in predicting play success appears to have a minimal effect, but additional data and future research may be needed to confirm that

October 14, 1978 Football Program, UOP vs. Fresno State

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/ua-football/1417/thumbnail.jp

Using Opponent Modeling to Adapt Team Play in American Football

An issue with learning effective policies in multi-agent adversarial games is that the size of the search space can be prohibitively large when the actions of both teammates and opponents are considered simultaneously. Opponent modeling, predicting an opponent’s actions in advance of execution, is one approach for selecting actions in adversarial settings, but it is often performed in an ad hoc way. In this chapter, we introduce several methods for using opponent modeling, in the form of predictions about the players ’ physical movements, to learn team policies. To explore the problem of decision-making in multi-agent adversarial scenarios, we use our approach for both offline play generation and real-time team response in the Rush 2008 American football simulator. Simultaneously predicting the movement trajectories, future reward, and play strategies of mul-tiple players in real-time is a daunting task but we illustrate how it is possible to divide and conquer this problem with an assortment of data-driven models