Deep learning for video game playing

In this article, we review recent Deep Learning advances in the context of how they have been applied to play different types of video games such as first-person shooters, arcade games, and real-time strategy games. We analyze the unique requirements that different game genres pose to a deep learning system and highlight important open challenges in the context of applying these machine learning methods to video games, such as general game playing, dealing with extremely large decision spaces and sparse rewards

General Video Game AI: Learning from screen capture

General Video Game Artificial Intelligence is a general game playing framework for Artificial General Intelligence research in the video-games domain. In this paper, we propose for the first time a screen capture learning agent for General Video Game AI framework. A Deep Q-Network algorithm was applied and improved to develop an agent capable of learning to play different games in the framework. After testing this algorithm using various games of different categories and difficulty levels, the results suggest that our proposed screen capture learning agent has the potential to learn many different games using only a single learning algorithm

AI for Classic Video Games using Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning is a technique to teach machines tasks based on trial and error experiences in the way humans learn. In this paper, some preliminary research is done to understand how reinforcement learning and deep learning techniques can be combined to train an agent to play Archon, a classic video game. We compare two methods to estimate a Q function, the function used to compute the best action to take at each point in the game. In the first approach, we used a Q table to store the states and weights of the corresponding actions. In our experiments, this method converged very slowly. Our second approach was similar to that of [1]: We used a convolutional neural network (CNN) to determine a Q function. This deep neural network model successfully learnt to control the Archon player using keyboard event that it generated. We observed that the second approaches Q function converged faster than the first. For the latter method, the neural net was trained only using prediodic screenshots taken while it was playing. Experiments were conducted on a machine that did not have a GPU, so our training was slower as compared to [1]

Indirect Match Highlights Detection with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Highlights in a sport video are usually referred as actions that stimulate excitement or attract attention of the audience. A big effort is spent in designing techniques which find automatically highlights, in order to automatize the otherwise manual editing process. Most of the state-of-the-art approaches try to solve the problem by training a classifier using the information extracted on the tv-like framing of players playing on the game pitch, learning to detect game actions which are labeled by human observers according to their perception of highlight. Obviously, this is a long and expensive work. In this paper, we reverse the paradigm: instead of looking at the gameplay, inferring what could be exciting for the audience, we directly analyze the audience behavior, which we assume is triggered by events happening during the game. We apply deep 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) to extract visual features from cropped video recordings of the supporters that are attending the event. Outputs of the crops belonging to the same frame are then accumulated to produce a value indicating the Highlight Likelihood (HL) which is then used to discriminate between positive (i.e. when a highlight occurs) and negative samples (i.e. standard play or time-outs). Experimental results on a public dataset of ice-hockey matches demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and promote further research in this new exciting direction.Comment: "Social Signal Processing and Beyond" workshop, in conjunction with ICIAP 201

Discovering multi-purpose modules through deep multitask learning

Machine learning scientists aim to discover techniques that can be applied across diverse sets of problems. Such techniques need to exploit regularities that are shared across tasks. This begs the question: What shared regularity is not yet being exploited? Complex tasks may share structure that is difficult for humans to discover. The goal of deep multitask learning is to discover and exploit this structure automatically by training a joint model across tasks. To this end, this dissertation introduces a deep multitask learning framework for collecting generic functional modules that are used in different ways to solve different problems. Within this framework, a progression of systems is developed based on assembling shared modules into task models and leveraging the complementary advantages of gradient descent and evolutionary optimization. In experiments, these systems confirm that modular sharing improves performance across a range of application areas, including general video game playing, computer vision, natural language processing, and genomics; yielding state-of-the-art results in several cases. The conclusion is that multi-purpose modules discovered by deep multitask learning can exceed those developed by humans in performance and generality.Computer Science

AI Researchers, Video Games Are Your Friends!

If you are an artificial intelligence researcher, you should look to video games as ideal testbeds for the work you do. If you are a video game developer, you should look to AI for the technology that makes completely new types of games possible. This chapter lays out the case for both of these propositions. It asks the question "what can video games do for AI", and discusses how in particular general video game playing is the ideal testbed for artificial general intelligence research. It then asks the question "what can AI do for video games", and lays out a vision for what video games might look like if we had significantly more advanced AI at our disposal. The chapter is based on my keynote at IJCCI 2015, and is written in an attempt to be accessible to a broad audience.Comment: in Studies in Computational Intelligence Studies in Computational Intelligence, Volume 669 2017. Springe