The Game Imitation: Deep Supervised Convolutional Networks for Quick Video Game AI

Abstract

We present a vision-only model for gaming AI which uses a late integration deep convolutional network architecture trained in a purely supervised imitation learning context. Although state-of-the-art deep learning models for video game tasks generally rely on more complex methods such as deep-Q learning, we show that a supervised model which requires substantially fewer resources and training time can already perform well at human reaction speeds on the N64 classic game Super Smash Bros. We frame our learning task as a 30-class classification problem, and our CNN model achieves 80% top-1 and 95% top-3 validation accuracy. With slight test-time fine-tuning, our model is also competitive during live simulation with the highest-level AI built into the game. We will further show evidence through network visualizations that the network is successfully leveraging temporal information during inference to aid in decision making. Our work demonstrates that supervised CNN models can provide good performance in challenging policy prediction tasks while being significantly simpler and more lightweight than alternatives.