Robust Reinforcement Learning for General Video Game Playing

Reinforcement learning has successfully learned to play challenging board and video games. However, its generalization ability remains under-explored. The General Video Game AI Learning Competition aims at designing agents that are capable of learning to play different games levels that were unseen during training. This paper presents the games, entries and results of the 2020 General Video Game AI Learning Competition, held at the Sixteenth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature and the 2020 IEEE Conference on Games. Three new games with sparse, periodic and dense rewards, respectively, were designed for this competition and the test levels were generated by adding minor perturbations to training levels or combining training levels. In this paper, we also design a reinforcement learning agent, called Arcane, for general video game playing. We assume that it is more likely to observe similar local information in different levels rather than global information. Therefore, instead of directly inputting a single, raw pixel-based screenshot of current game screen, Arcane takes the encoded, transformed global and local observations of the game screen as two simultaneous inputs, aiming at learning local information for playing new levels. Two versions of Arcane, using a stochastic or deterministic policy for decision-making during test, both show robust performance on the game set of the 2020 General Video Game AI Learning Competition.