ChatPCG: Large Language Model-Driven Reward Design for Procedural Content Generation

Driven by the rapid growth of machine learning, recent advances in game artificial intelligence (AI) have significantly impacted productivity across various gaming genres. Reward design plays a pivotal role in training game AI models, wherein researchers implement concepts of specific reward functions. However, despite the presence of AI, the reward design process predominantly remains in the domain of human experts, as it is heavily reliant on their creativity and engineering skills. Therefore, this paper proposes ChatPCG, a large language model (LLM)-driven reward design framework.It leverages human-level insights, coupled with game expertise, to generate rewards tailored to specific game features automatically. Moreover, ChatPCG is integrated with deep reinforcement learning, demonstrating its potential for multiplayer game content generation tasks. The results suggest that the proposed LLM exhibits the capability to comprehend game mechanics and content generation tasks, enabling tailored content generation for a specified game. This study not only highlights the potential for improving accessibility in content generation but also aims to streamline the game AI development process.

Discrete Prompt Compression with Reinforcement Learning

Instruction-tuned Language Models (LMs) are widely used by users to address various problems with task-specific prompts. Constraints associated with the context window length and computational costs encourage the development of compressed prompts. Existing methods rely heavily on training embeddings, which are designed to accommodate multiple token meanings. This presents challenges in terms of interpretability, a fixed number of embedding tokens, reusability across different LMs, and inapplicability when interacting with black-box APIs. This study proposes prompt compression with reinforcement learning (PCRL), a novel discrete prompt compression method that addresses these issues. PCRL employs a computationally efficient policy network that directly edits prompts. The PCRL training approach can be flexibly applied to various types of LMs, as well as decoder-only and encoder-decoder architecture, and can be trained without gradient access to LMs or labeled data. PCRL achieves an average reduction of 24.6% in token count across various instruction prompts while preserving performance. Further, we demonstrate that the learned policy can be transferred to larger LMs, and through various analyses, we aid the understanding of token importance within prompts.

RaidEnv: Exploring New Challenges in Automated Content Balancing for Boss Raid Games

The balance of game content significantly impacts the gaming experience. Unbalanced game content diminishes engagement or increases frustration because of repetitive failure. Although game designers intend to adjust the difficulty of game content, this is a repetitive, labor-intensive, and challenging process, especially for commercial-level games with extensive content. To address this issue, the game research community has explored automated game balancing using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. However, previous studies have focused on limited game content and did not consider the importance of the generalization ability of playtesting agents when encountering content changes. In this study, we propose RaidEnv, a new game simulator that includes diverse and customizable content for the boss raid scenario in MMORPG games. Additionally, we design two benchmarks for the boss raid scenario that can aid in the practical application of game AI. These benchmarks address two open problems in automatic content balancing, and we introduce two evaluation metrics to provide guidance for AI in automatic content balancing. This novel game research platform expands the frontiers of automatic game balancing problems and offers a framework within a realistic game production pipeline.

Behavioral Differences is the Key of Ad-hoc Team Cooperation in Multiplayer Games Hanabi

Ad-hoc team cooperation is the problem of cooperating with other players that have not been seen in the learning process. Recently, this problem has been considered in the context of Hanabi, which requires cooperation without explicit communication with the other players. While in self-play strategies cooperating on reinforcement learning (RL) process has shown success, there is the problem of failing to cooperate with other unseen agents after the initial learning is completed. In this paper, we categorize the results of ad-hoc team cooperation into Failure, Success, and Synergy and analyze the associated failures. First, we confirm that agents learning via RL converge to one strategy each, but not necessarily the same strategy and that these agents can deploy different strategies even though they utilize the same hyperparameters. Second, we confirm that the larger the behavioral difference, the more pronounced the failure of ad-hoc team cooperation, as demonstrated using hierarchical clustering and Pearson correlation. We confirm that such agents are grouped into distinctly different groups through hierarchical clustering, such that the correlation between behavioral differences and ad-hoc team performance is -0.978. Our results improve understanding of key factors to form successful ad-hoc team cooperation in multi-player games.