VGML workshop @ICML2017 (Sydney)

Welcome to the ICML 2017 workshop: Video Games and Machine Learning (room C4.6)

Good benchmarks are necessary for developing artificial intelligence. Recently, there has been a growing movement for the use of video games as machine learning benchmarks [1,2,3,4], and also an interest in the applications of machine learning from the video games community. While games have been used for AI research for a long time, only recently have we seen modern machine learning methods applied to video games.

This workshop focuses on complex games which provide interesting and hard challenges for machine learning. Going beyond simple toy problems of the past, and games which can easily be solved with search, we focus on games where learning is likely to be necessary to play well. This includes strategy games such as StarCraft [5,6,7], open-world games such as MineCraft [8,9,10], first-person shooters such as Doom [11,12], as well as hard and unsolved 2D games such as Ms. Pac-Man and Montezuma's Revenge [13,14,15]. While we see most of the challenges in game-playing, there are also interesting machine learning challenges in modeling and content generation [16]. This workshop aims at bringing together all researchers from ICML who want to use video games as a benchmark.

Invited Speakers

Katja Hofmann, Microsoft Research, project Malmo lead

Honglak Lee, University of Michigan, associate professor, Google Brain, research scientist

Marc G. Bellemare, Google DeepMind, research scientist (confirmed)

Max Jaderberg, Google DeepMind, research scientist

Jacob Repp, Blizzard, principal engineer

Yuandong Tian, Facebook, research scientist

Magnus Nordin, Electronic Arts, head of DL team

Call for Papers

We invite contributions on any topic that brings together video games and machine learning. We welcome contributions up to four (4) pages of body, with unlimited pages for references and appendices. Reviewers can take their decision based only on the four pages of body. Submissions should be blind (anonymous version).



All accepted papers will have a poster, we will have dedicated time for poster sessions, and we reserve orals for submissions with (in order of priority): interactive demos, demos, and videos.

Submission deadline: June 23rd midnight pacific time

Acceptance/rejection answer by: July 7th

The workshop will take place at the ICML 2017 venue in Sydney, on August 10th

Submission URL

Paper style kit

Organization

Workshop on the ICML website

Date: August 10th, 2017

Organisers:

Gabriel Synnaeve (gab@fb.com, Facebook AI Research)

Julian Togelius (julian@togelius.com, NYU)

Tom Schaul (schaul@gmail.com, Google DeepMind)

Oriol Vinyals (vinyals@google.com, Google DeepMind)

Nicolas Usunier (usunier@fb.com, Facebook AI Research)

Schedule

The workshop starts at 9am on August 10th in room C4.6

9:00 AM introduction 9:20 AM Yuandong Tian AI in Games: Achievements and Challenges 10:00 AM spotlight1: Jakob Foerster, Gregory Farquhar, Triantafyllos Afouras, Nantas Nardelli and Shimon Whiteson Counterfactual Multi-Agent Policy Gradients 10:10 AM spotlight2: Simón Algorta and Özgür Şimşek The Game of Tetris in Machine Learning 10:20 AM Marc Bellemare Modern Reinforcement Learning and the Atari 2600 11:00 AM coffee break and posters 11:30 AM Magnus Nordin Machine Learning for Game Development 12:10 AM spotlight3: Harm van Seijen, Mehdi Fatemi, Joshua Romoff and Romain Laroche Achieving Above-Human Performance on Ms. Pac-Man by Reward Decomposition 12:20 AM spotlight4: Christopher Beckham and Christopher Pal A step towards procedural terrain generation with GANs 12:30 PM lunch break 1:30 PM Katja Hofman Challenges in Collaborative Game AI 2:10 PM Jacob Repp Machine Learning with StarCraft II 2:50 PM coffee break and posters 3:30 PM Max Jaderberg Reinforcement Learning in 3D Game Environments 4:10 PM Honglak Lee Deep Reinforcement Learning with Minecraft 4:50 PM break and panel set-up 5:00 PM panel with all invited speakers 6:00 PM end