AAAI.2019 - Game Playing and Interactive Entertainment

| Total: 4

#1 Tackling Sparse Rewards in Real-Time Games with Statistical Forward Planning Methods [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi1] [REL]

Authors: Raluca D. Gaina ; Simon M. Lucas ; Diego Pérez-Liébana

One of the issues general AI game players are required to deal with is the different reward systems in the variety of games they are expected to be able to play at a high level. Some games may present plentiful rewards which the agents can use to guide their search for the best solution, whereas others feature sparse reward landscapes that provide little information to the agents. The work presented in this paper focuses on the latter case, which most agents struggle with. Thus, modifications are proposed for two algorithms, Monte Carlo Tree Search and Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms, aiming at improving performance in this type of games while maintaining overall win rate across those where rewards are plentiful. Results show that longer rollouts and individual lengths, either fixed or responsive to changes in fitness landscape features, lead to a boost of performance in the games during testing without being detrimental to non-sparse reward scenarios.

#2 Regular Boardgames [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Jakub Kowalski ; Maksymilian Mika ; Jakub Sutowicz ; Marek Szykuła

We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) language called Regular Boardgames (RBG), which is based on the theory of regular languages. The objective of RBG is to join key properties as expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness of the description in one GGP formalism, compensating certain drawbacks of the existing languages. This often makes RBG more suitable for various research and practical developments in GGP. While dedicated mostly for describing board games, RBG is universal for the class of all finite deterministic turn-based games with perfect information. We establish foundations of RBG, and analyze it theoretically and experimentally, focusing on the efficiency of reasoning. Regular Boardgames is the first GGP language that allows efficient encoding and playing games with complex rules and with large branching factor (e.g. amazons, arimaa, large chess variants, go, international checkers, paper soccer).

#3 3D Face Synthesis Driven by Personality Impression [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Yining Lang ; Wei Liang ; Yujia Wang ; Lap-Fai Yu

Synthesizing 3D faces that give certain personality impressions is commonly needed in computer games, animations, and virtual world applications for producing realistic virtual characters. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to synthesize 3D faces based on personality impression for creating virtual characters. Our approach consists of two major steps. In the first step, we train classifiers using deep convolutional neural networks on a dataset of images with personality impression annotations, which are capable of predicting the personality impression of a face. In the second step, given a 3D face and a desired personality impression type as user inputs, our approach optimizes the facial details against the trained classifiers, so as to synthesize a face which gives the desired personality impression. We demonstrate our approach for synthesizing 3D faces giving desired personality impressions on a variety of 3D face models. Perceptual studies show that the perceived personality impressions of the synthesized faces agree with the target personality impressions specified for synthesizing the faces.

#4 Learning to Write Stories with Thematic Consistency and Wording Novelty [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Juntao Li ; Lidong Bing ; Lisong Qiu ; Dongmin Chen ; Dongyan Zhao ; Rui Yan

Automatic story generation is a challenging task, which involves automatically comprising a sequence of sentences or words with a consistent topic and novel wordings. Although many attention has been paid to this task and prompting progress has been made, there still exists a noticeable gap between generated stories and those created by humans, especially in terms of thematic consistency and wording novelty. To fill this gap, we propose a cache-augmented conditional variational autoencoder for story generation, where the cache module allows to improve thematic consistency while the conditional variational autoencoder part is used for generating stories with less common words by using a continuous latent variable. For combing the cache module and the autoencoder part, we further introduce an effective gate mechanism. Experimental results on ROCStories and WritingPrompts indicate that our proposed model can generate stories with consistency and wording novelty, and outperforms existing models under both automatic metrics and human evaluations.