arXiv subjects

Santiago Ontañón

Publications and source records attributed to Santiago Ontañón.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Action Guidance: Getting the Best of Sparse Rewards and Shaped Rewards for Real-time Strategy Games

Training agents using Reinforcement Learning in games with sparse rewards is a challenging problem, since large amounts of exploration are required to retrieve even the first reward. To tackle this problem, a common approach is to use reward shaping to help exploration. However, an important drawback of reward shaping is that agents sometimes learn to optimize the shaped reward instead of the true objective. In this paper, we present a novel technique that we call action guidance that successfully trains agents to eventually optimize the true objective in games with sparse rewards while maintaining most of the sample efficiency that comes with reward shaping. We evaluate our approach in a simplified real-time strategy (RTS) game simulator called $μ$RTS.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Understanding Learners' Problem-Solving Strategies in Concurrent and Parallel Programming: A Game-Based Approach

Concurrent and parallel programming (CPP) is an increasingly important subject in Computer Science Education. However, the conceptual shift from sequential programming is notoriously difficult to make. Currently, relatively little research exists on how people learn CPP core concepts. This paper presents our results of using Parallel, an educational game about CPP, focusing on the learners' self-efficacy and how they learn CPP concepts. Based on a study of 44 undergraduate students, our research shows that (a) self-efficacy increased significantly after playing the game; (b) the problem-solving strategies employed by students playing the game can be classified in three main types: trial and error, single-thread, and multi-threaded strategies, and (c) that self-efficacy is correlated with the percentage of time students spend in multithreaded problem-solving.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Comparing Observation and Action Representations for Deep Reinforcement Learning in $μ$RTS

This paper presents a preliminary study comparing different observation and action space representations for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in the context of Real-time Strategy (RTS) games. Specifically, we compare two representations: (1) a global representation where the observation represents the whole game state, and the RL agent needs to choose which unit to issue actions to, and which actions to execute; and (2) a local representation where the observation is represented from the point of view of an individual unit, and the RL agent picks actions for each unit independently. We evaluate these representations in $μ$RTS showing that the local representation seems to outperform the global representation when training agents with the task of harvesting resources.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

RHOG: A Refinement-Operator Library for Directed Labeled Graphs

This document provides the foundations behind the functionality provided by the $ρ$G library (https://github.com/santiontanon/RHOG), focusing on the basic operations the library provides: subsumption, refinement of directed labeled graphs, and distance/similarity assessment between directed labeled graphs. $ρ$G development was initially supported by the National Science Foundation, by the EAGER grant IIS-1551338.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2020

An Overview of Distance and Similarity Functions for Structured Data

The notions of distance and similarity play a key role in many machine learning approaches, and artificial intelligence (AI) in general, since they can serve as an organizing principle by which individuals classify objects, form concepts and make generalizations. While distance functions for propositional representations have been thoroughly studied, work on distance functions for structured representations, such as graphs, frames or logical clauses, has been carried out in different communities and is much less understood. Specifically, a significant amount of work that requires the use of a distance or similarity function for structured representations of data usually employs ad-hoc functions for specific applications. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to provide an overview of this work to identify connections between the work carried out in different areas and point out directions for future work.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Tracing Player Knowledge in a Parallel Programming Educational Game

This paper focuses on "tracing player knowledge" in educational games. Specifically, given a set of concepts or skills required to master a game, the goal is to estimate the likelihood with which the current player has mastery of each of those concepts or skills. The main contribution of the paper is an approach that integrates machine learning and domain knowledge rules to find when the player applied a certain skill and either succeeded or failed. This is then given as input to a standard knowledge tracing module (such as those from Intelligent Tutoring Systems) to perform knowledge tracing. We evaluate our approach in the context of an educational game called "Parallel" to teach parallel and concurrent programming with data collected from real users, showing our approach can predict students skills with a low mean-squared error.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Experience Management in Multi-player Games

Experience Management studies AI systems that automatically adapt interactive experiences such as games to tailor to specific players and to fulfill design goals. Although it has been explored for several decades, existing work in experience management has mostly focused on single-player experiences. This paper is a first attempt at identifying the main challenges to expand EM to multi-player/multi-user games or experiences. We also make connections to related areas where solutions for similar problems have been proposed (especially group recommender systems) and discusses the potential impact and applications of multi-player EM.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2017

Combinatorial Multi-armed Bandits for Real-Time Strategy Games

Games with large branching factors pose a significant challenge for game tree search algorithms. In this paper, we address this problem with a sampling strategy for Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms called {\em naïve sampling}, based on a variant of the Multi-armed Bandit problem called {\em Combinatorial Multi-armed Bandits} (CMAB). We analyze the theoretical properties of several variants of {\em naïve sampling}, and empirically compare it against the other existing strategies in the literature for CMABs. We then evaluate these strategies in the context of real-time strategy (RTS) games, a genre of computer games characterized by their very large branching factors. Our results show that as the branching factor grows, {\em naïve sampling} outperforms the other sampling strategies.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2016

The VGLC: The Video Game Level Corpus

Levels are a key component of many different video games, and a large body of work has been produced on how to procedurally generate game levels. Recently, Machine Learning techniques have been applied to video game level generation towards the purpose of automatically generating levels that have the properties of the training corpus. Towards that end we have made available a corpora of video game levels in an easy to parse format ideal for different machine learning and other game AI research purposes.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2016

Combat Models for RTS Games

Game tree search algorithms, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), require access to a forward model (or "simulator") of the game at hand. However, in some games such forward model is not readily available. This paper presents three forward models for two-player attrition games, which we call "combat models", and show how they can be used to simulate combat in RTS games. We also show how these combat models can be learned from replay data. We use StarCraft as our application domain. We report experiments comparing our combat models predicting a combat output and their impact when used for tactical decisions during a real game.

cs.AI↗