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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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Shyam Sudhakaran , Miguel González-Duque , Claire Glanois , Matthias Freiberger , Elias Najarro , Sebastian Risi

Procedural Level Generation via Machine Learning (PLGML), the study of generating game levels with machine learning, has received a large amount of recent academic attention. For certain measures these approaches have shown success at…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-26 Matthew Guzdial , Nicholas Liao , Mark Riedl

While generalization over tasks from easy to hard is crucial to profile language models (LLMs), the datasets with fine-grained difficulty annotations for each problem across a broad range of complexity are still blank. Aiming to address…

Game development is a highly technical practice that traditionally requires programming skills. This serves as a barrier to entry for would-be developers or those hoping to use games as part of their creative expression. While there have…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Megan Sumner , Vardan Saini , Matthew Guzdial

We adopt the distribution and expectation of guessing times in game Wordle as metrics to predict the difficulty of words and explore their influence factors. In order to predictthe difficulty distribution, we use Monte Carlo to simulate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Beibei Liu , Yuanfang Zhang , Shiyu Zhang

Help facilities have been crucial in helping users learn about software for decades. But despite widespread prevalence of game engines and game editors that ship with many of today's most popular games, there is a lack of empirical evidence…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Dominic Kao

Methods for dynamic difficulty adjustment allow games to be tailored to particular players to maximize their engagement. However, current methods often only modify a limited set of game features such as the difficulty of the opponents, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Miguel González-Duque , Rasmus Berg Palm , David Ha , Sebastian Risi

Algorithms that generate computer game content require game design knowledge. We present an approach to automatically learn game design knowledge for level design from gameplay videos. We further demonstrate how the acquired design…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-02-26 Matthew Guzdial , Mark Riedl

Self-play preference optimization has emerged as a prominent paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs). It typically involves a language model to generate on-policy responses for prompts and a reward model (RM) to guide the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yao Xiao , Jung-jae Kim , Roy Ka-wei Lee , Lidong Bing

In recent years, Procedural Level Generation via Machine Learning (PLGML) techniques have been applied to generate game levels with machine learning. These approaches rely on human-annotated representations of game levels. Creating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-08 Mrunal Jadhav , Matthew Guzdial

Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked new opportunities for procedural content generation. However, recent attempts mainly focus on level generation for specific games with defined game rules such as Super…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Chengpeng Hu , Yunlong Zhao , Jialin Liu

We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) generalize across different task difficulties, a key question for effective data curation and evaluation. Existing research is mixed regarding whether training on easier or harder data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Yeganeh Kordi , Nihal V. Nayak , Max Zuo , Ilana Nguyen , Stephen H. Bach

Balancing games, especially those with asymmetric multiplayer content, requires significant manual effort and extensive human playtesting during development. For this reason, this work focuses on generating balanced levels tailored to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Florian Rupp , Kai Eckert

Game level editing is the process of constructing a full game level starting from 3D asset libraries, e.g. 3d models, textures, shaders, scripts. In level editing, designers define the look and behavior of the whole level by placing…

Graphics · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Christian Santoni , Gabriele Salvati , Valentina Tibaldo , Fabio Pellacini

This paper presents a level generation method for Super Mario by stitching together pre-generated "scenes" that contain specific mechanics, using mechanic-sequences from agent playthroughs as input specifications. Given a sequence of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Michael Cerny Green , Luvneesh Mugrai , Ahmed Khalifa , Julian Togelius

Predicting problem-difficulty in large language models (LLMs) refers to estimating how difficult a task is according to the model itself, typically by training linear probes on its internal representations. In this work, we study the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Stefano Civelli , Pietro Bernardelle , Nicolò Brunello , Gianluca Demartini

Educational games can foster critical thinking, problem-solving, and motivation, yet instructors often find it difficult to design games that reliably achieve specific learning outcomes. Existing authoring environments reduce the need for…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daijin Yang , Erica Kleinman , Casper Harteveld

In this paper we evaluate the capabilities of LLM Agents in generating code for real-world problems. Specifically, we explore code synthesis for microservice-based applications, a widely used architectural pattern for building applications.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Daniel M. Yellin

We prove PSPACE-hardness for fifteen games in the Super Mario Bros. 2D platforming video game series. Previously, only the original Super Mario Bros. was known to be PSPACE-hard (FUN 2016), though several of the games we study were known to…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2024-04-17 MIT Hardness Group , Hayashi Ani , Erik D. Demaine , Holden Hall , Matias Korman

This paper presents an adaptive level generation algorithm for the physics-based puzzle game Angry Birds. The proposed algorithm is based on a pre-existing level generator for this game, but where the difficulty of the generated levels can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-08 Matthew Stephenson , Jochen Renz