Related papers: Combining Evolutionary Search with Behaviour Cloni…
Video games demand is constantly increasing, which requires the costly production of large amounts of content. Towards this challenge, researchers have developed Search-Based Procedural Content Generation (SBPCG), that is, the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved significant success in application domains such as robotics, games and health care. However, training RL agents is very time consuming. Current implementations exhibit poor performance due to…
Procedural content generation (PCG) is a growing field, with numerous applications in the video game industry and great potential to help create better games at a fraction of the cost of manual creation. However, much of the work in PCG is…
Although automated test generation is common in many programming domains, games still challenge test generators due to their heavy randomisation and hard-to-reach program states. Neuroevolution combined with search-based software testing…
Understanding how the time-complexity of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) depend on their parameter settings and characteristics of fitness landscapes is a fundamental problem in evolutionary computation. Most rigorous results were derived…
With increasing interest in procedural content generation by academia and game developers alike, it is vital that different approaches can be compared fairly. However, evaluating procedurally generated video game levels is often difficult,…
Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space. We…
Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning (PCGRL) has been introduced as a means by which controllable designer agents can be trained based only on a set of computable metrics acting as a proxy for the level's quality and key…
Context: Evolutionary algorithms typically require a large number of evaluations (of solutions) to converge - which can be very slow and expensive to evaluate.Objective: To solve search-based software engineering (SE) problems, using fewer…
We explore the use of Evolution Strategies (ES), a class of black box optimization algorithms, as an alternative to popular MDP-based RL techniques such as Q-learning and Policy Gradients. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari show that ES is a…
Prior research has shown variational autoencoders (VAEs) to be useful for generating and blending game levels by learning latent representations of existing level data. We build on such models by exploring the level design affordances and…
Combinatorial optimization problems are notoriously challenging due to their discrete structure and exponentially large solution space. Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have enabled the learning heuristics directly from…
Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is a technique to generate complex and diverse environments in an automated way. However, while generating content with PCG methods is often straightforward, generating meaningful content that reflects…
Autonomous multi-agent systems such as hospital robots and package delivery drones often operate in highly uncertain environments and are expected to achieve complex temporal task objectives while ensuring safety. While learning-based…
Procedural content generation (PCG) has become an increasingly popular technique in game development, allowing developers to generate dynamic, replayable, and scalable environments with reduced manual effort. In this study, a novel method…
Reinforcement learning (RL) studies how an agent comes to achieve reward in an environment through interactions over time. Recent advances in machine RL have surpassed human expertise at the world's oldest board games and many classic video…
Recent research has highlighted the significance of natural language in enhancing the controllability of generative models. While various efforts have been made to leverage natural language for content generation, research on deep…
Masked Generative Models (MGM)s demonstrate strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity images. However, they need many sampling steps to create high-quality generations, resulting in slow inference speed. In this work, we propose…
The procedural generation of video game levels has existed for at least 30 years, but only recently have machine learning approaches been used to generate levels without specifying the rules for generation. A number of these have looked at…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown im-pressive results for image generation. However, GANs facechallenges in generating contents with certain types of con-straints, such as game levels. Specifically, it is difficult…