arXiv:2611.16175v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Super Mario Bros. is widely used in game AI and procedural content generation (PCG), yet it remains unclear whether a model-free agent can reliably win unseen levels. To address this question, we train Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agents on increasingly large sets of PCG-generated Mario levels and evaluate their generalization on 1000 held-out test levels. We then shape competent PPO policies into three gameplay archetypes—runner, killer, and collector. Finally, we fine-tune these PPO policies using Diffusion-Reward Adversarial Imitation Learning (DRAIL) with human gameplay demonstrations. We find that increasing the number of distinct PCG-generated training levels generally improves unseen-level performance, and that fine-tuning PPO policies with DRAIL increases action-level human-likeness while preserving much of the persona induced by PPO pretraining.
Abstract: Super Mario Bros. is widely used in game AI and procedural content generation (PCG), yet it remains unclear whether a model-free agent can reliably win unseen levels. To address this question, we train Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agents on increasingly large sets of PCG-generated Mario levels and evaluate their generalization on 1000 held-out test levels. We then shape competent PPO policies into three gameplay archetypes—runner, killer, and collector. Finally, we fine-tune these PPO policies using Diffusion-Reward Adversarial Imitation Learning (DRAIL) with human gameplay demonstrations. We find that increasing the number of distinct PCG-generated training levels generally improves unseen-level performance, and that fine-tuning PPO policies with DRAIL increases action-level human-likeness while preserving much of the persona induced by PPO pretraining.
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