Expandable Decision-Making States for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning in Soccer Tactical Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ide, Kenjiro, Someya, Taiga, Kawaguchi, Kohei, Fujii, Keisuke
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ide, Kenjiro
Someya, Taiga
Kawaguchi, Kohei
Fujii, Keisuke
author_facet Ide, Kenjiro
Someya, Taiga
Kawaguchi, Kohei
Fujii, Keisuke
contents Invasion team sports such as soccer produce a high-dimensional, strongly coupled state space as many players continuously interact on a shared field, challenging quantitative tactical analysis. Traditional rule-based analyses are intuitive, while modern predictive machine learning models often perform pattern-matching without explicit agent representations. The problem we address is how to build player-level agent models from data, whose learned values and policies are both tactically interpretable and robust across heterogeneous data sources. Here, we propose Expandable Decision-Making States (EDMS), a semantically enriched state representation that augments raw positions and velocities with relational variables (e.g., scoring of space, pass, and score), combined with an action-masking scheme that gives on-ball and off-ball agents distinct decision sets. Compared to prior work, EDMS maps learned value functions and action policies to human-interpretable tactical concepts (e.g., marking pressure, passing lanes, ball accessibility) instead of raw coordinate features, and aligns agent choices with the rules of play. In the experiments, EDMS with action masking consistently reduced both action-prediction loss and temporal-difference (TD) error compared to the baseline. Qualitative case studies and Q-value visualizations further indicate that EDMS highlights high-risk, high-reward tactical patterns (e.g., fast counterattacks and defensive breakthroughs). We also integrated our approach into an open-source library and demonstrated compatibility with multiple commercial and open datasets, enabling cross-provider evaluation and reproducible experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00480
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Expandable Decision-Making States for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning in Soccer Tactical Analysis
Ide, Kenjiro
Someya, Taiga
Kawaguchi, Kohei
Fujii, Keisuke
Artificial Intelligence
Invasion team sports such as soccer produce a high-dimensional, strongly coupled state space as many players continuously interact on a shared field, challenging quantitative tactical analysis. Traditional rule-based analyses are intuitive, while modern predictive machine learning models often perform pattern-matching without explicit agent representations. The problem we address is how to build player-level agent models from data, whose learned values and policies are both tactically interpretable and robust across heterogeneous data sources. Here, we propose Expandable Decision-Making States (EDMS), a semantically enriched state representation that augments raw positions and velocities with relational variables (e.g., scoring of space, pass, and score), combined with an action-masking scheme that gives on-ball and off-ball agents distinct decision sets. Compared to prior work, EDMS maps learned value functions and action policies to human-interpretable tactical concepts (e.g., marking pressure, passing lanes, ball accessibility) instead of raw coordinate features, and aligns agent choices with the rules of play. In the experiments, EDMS with action masking consistently reduced both action-prediction loss and temporal-difference (TD) error compared to the baseline. Qualitative case studies and Q-value visualizations further indicate that EDMS highlights high-risk, high-reward tactical patterns (e.g., fast counterattacks and defensive breakthroughs). We also integrated our approach into an open-source library and demonstrated compatibility with multiple commercial and open datasets, enabling cross-provider evaluation and reproducible experiments.
title Expandable Decision-Making States for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning in Soccer Tactical Analysis
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00480