arXiv subjects

Fabio Zinno

Publications and source records attributed to Fabio Zinno.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Human-Like Goalkeeping in a Realistic Football Simulation: a Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Approach

While several high profile video games have served as testbeds for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), this technique has rarely been employed by the game industry for crafting authentic AI behaviors. Previous research focuses on training super-human agents with large models, which is impractical for game studios with limited resources aiming for human-like agents. This paper proposes a sample-efficient DRL method tailored for training and fine-tuning agents in industrial settings such as the video game industry. Our method improves sample efficiency of value-based DRL by leveraging pre-collected data and increasing network plasticity. We evaluate our method training a goalkeeper agent in EA SPORTS FC 25, one of the best-selling football simulations today. Our agent outperforms the game's built-in AI by 10% in ball saving rate. Ablation studies show that our method trains agents 50% faster compared to standard DRL methods. Finally, qualitative evaluation from domain experts indicates that our approach creates more human-like gameplay compared to hand-crafted agents. As a testament to the impact of the approach, the method has been adopted for use in the most recent release of the series.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

StableMotion: Training Motion Cleanup Models with Unpaired Corrupted Data

Motion capture (mocap) data often exhibits visually jarring artifacts due to inaccurate sensors and post-processing. Cleaning this corrupted data can require substantial manual effort from human experts, which can be a costly and time-consuming process. Previous data-driven motion cleanup methods offer the promise of automating this cleanup process, but often require in-domain paired corrupted-to-clean training data. Constructing such paired datasets requires access to high-quality, relatively artifact-free motion clips, which often necessitates laborious manual cleanup. In this work, we present StableMotion, a simple yet effective method for training motion cleanup models directly from unpaired corrupted datasets that need cleanup. The core component of our method is the introduction of motion quality indicators, which can be easily annotated - through manual labeling or heuristic algorithms - and enable training of quality-aware motion generation models on raw motion data with mixed quality. At test time, the model can be prompted to generate high-quality motions using the quality indicators. Our method can be implemented through a simple diffusion-based framework, leading to a unified motion generate-discriminate model, which can be used to both identify and fix corrupted frames. We demonstrate that our proposed method is effective for training motion cleanup models on raw mocap data in production scenarios by applying StableMotion to SoccerMocap, a 245-hour soccer mocap dataset containing real-world motion artifacts. The trained model effectively corrects a wide range of motion artifacts, reducing motion pops and frozen frames by 68% and 81%, respectively. Results and code are available at https://yxmu.foo/stablemotion-page

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Character Controllers Using Motion VAEs

A fundamental problem in computer animation is that of realizing purposeful and realistic human movement given a sufficiently-rich set of motion capture clips. We learn data-driven generative models of human movement using autoregressive conditional variational autoencoders, or Motion VAEs. The latent variables of the learned autoencoder define the action space for the movement and thereby govern its evolution over time. Planning or control algorithms can then use this action space to generate desired motions. In particular, we use deep reinforcement learning to learn controllers that achieve goal-directed movements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach on multiple tasks. We further evaluate system-design choices and describe the current limitations of Motion VAEs.

cs.LG↗