Human-Level Competitive Pokémon via Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning with Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Grigsby, Jake, Xie, Yuqi, Sasek, Justin, Zheng, Steven, Zhu, Yuke
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Grigsby, Jake
Xie, Yuqi
Sasek, Justin
Zheng, Steven
Zhu, Yuke
author_facet Grigsby, Jake
Xie, Yuqi
Sasek, Justin
Zheng, Steven
Zhu, Yuke
contents Competitive Pokémon Singles (CPS) is a popular strategy game where players learn to exploit their opponent based on imperfect information in battles that can last more than one hundred stochastic turns. AI research in CPS has been led by heuristic tree search and online self-play, but the game may also create a platform to study adaptive policies trained offline on large datasets. We develop a pipeline to reconstruct the first-person perspective of an agent from logs saved from the third-person perspective of a spectator, thereby unlocking a dataset of real human battles spanning more than a decade that grows larger every day. This dataset enables a black-box approach where we train large sequence models to adapt to their opponent based solely on their input trajectory while selecting moves without explicit search of any kind. We study a progression from imitation learning to offline RL and offline fine-tuning on self-play data in the hardcore competitive setting of Pokémon's four oldest (and most partially observed) game generations. The resulting agents outperform a recent LLM Agent approach and a strong heuristic search engine. While playing anonymously in online battles against humans, our best agents climb to rankings inside the top 10% of active players. All agent checkpoints, training details, datasets, and baselines are available at https://metamon.tech.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_04395
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Human-Level Competitive Pokémon via Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning with Transformers
Grigsby, Jake
Xie, Yuqi
Sasek, Justin
Zheng, Steven
Zhu, Yuke
Machine Learning
Competitive Pokémon Singles (CPS) is a popular strategy game where players learn to exploit their opponent based on imperfect information in battles that can last more than one hundred stochastic turns. AI research in CPS has been led by heuristic tree search and online self-play, but the game may also create a platform to study adaptive policies trained offline on large datasets. We develop a pipeline to reconstruct the first-person perspective of an agent from logs saved from the third-person perspective of a spectator, thereby unlocking a dataset of real human battles spanning more than a decade that grows larger every day. This dataset enables a black-box approach where we train large sequence models to adapt to their opponent based solely on their input trajectory while selecting moves without explicit search of any kind. We study a progression from imitation learning to offline RL and offline fine-tuning on self-play data in the hardcore competitive setting of Pokémon's four oldest (and most partially observed) game generations. The resulting agents outperform a recent LLM Agent approach and a strong heuristic search engine. While playing anonymously in online battles against humans, our best agents climb to rankings inside the top 10% of active players. All agent checkpoints, training details, datasets, and baselines are available at https://metamon.tech.
title Human-Level Competitive Pokémon via Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning with Transformers
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04395