Discovering Agent Behaviors Through Code Reuse: Examples From Half-Field Offense and Ms. Pac-Man
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper demonstrates how code reuse allows genetic programming (GP) to discover strategies for difficult gaming scenarios while maintaining relatively low model complexity. Critical factors in the proposed approach are illustrated through an in-depth study in two challenging task domains: RoboCup soccer and Ms. Pac-Man. In RoboCup, we demonstrate how policies initially evolved for simple subtasks can be reused, with no additional training or transfer function, in order to improve learning in the complex half-field offense (HFO) task. We then show how the same approach to code reuse can be applied directly in Ms. Pac-Man. In the latter case, the use of task-agnostic diversity maintenance removes the need to explicitly identify suitable subtasks a priori. The resulting GP policies achieve state-of-the-art levels of play in HFO and surpass scores previously reported in the Ms. Pac-Man literature, while employing less domain knowledge during training. Moreover, the highly modular policies discovered by GP are shown to be significantly less complex than state-of-the-art solutions in both domains. Throughout this paper, we pay special attention to a pair of task-agnostic diversity maintenance techniques, and empirically demonstrate their importance to the development of strong policies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it