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Devising models that reliably recognize player goals is a key challenge in creating player-adaptive games. Player goal recognition is the task of automatically recognizing the intent of a player from a sequence of observed player actions in a game environment. In open-world digital games, players often undertake suboptimal and varied sequences of actions to achieve goals, and the high degree of freedom afforded to players makes it challenging to identify sequential patterns that lead toward specific goals. To address these issues, we present a player goal recognition framework that utilizes a fine-tuned T5 language model, which incorporates our novel attention mechanism called Temporal Contrary Attention (TCA). The T5 language model enables the framework to exploit correlations between observations through non-sequential self-attention within input sequences, while TCA enables the framework to learn to eliminate goal hypotheses by considering counterevidence within a temporal window. We evaluate our approach using game trace data collected from 144 players' interactions with an open-world educational game. Specifically, we investigate the predictive capacity of our approach to recognize player goals as well as player plans represented as abstract actions. Results show that our approach outperforms non-linguistic machine learning approaches as well as T5 without TCA. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design and development of player goal recognition models to create player-adaptive games.
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I Cast Detect Thoughts: Learning to Converse and Guide with Intents and Theory-of-Mind in Dungeons and Dragons
We propose a novel task, G4C (Goal-driven Guidance Generation in Grounded Communication), for studying goal-driven and grounded natural language interactions. Specifically, we choose Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) -- a role-playing game consisting of multiple player characters and a Dungeon Master (DM) who collaborate to achieve a set of goals that are beneficial to the players -- as a testbed for this task. Here, each of the player characters is a student, with their own personas and abilities, and the DM is the teacher, an arbitrator of the rules of the world and responsible for assisting and guiding the students towards a global goal. We propose a theory-of-mind-inspired methodology for training such a DM with reinforcement learning (RL), where a DM: (1) learns to predict how the players will react to its utterances using a dataset of D&D dialogue transcripts; and (2) uses this prediction as a reward function providing feedback on how effective these utterances are at guiding the players towards a goal. Human and automated evaluations show that a DM trained with RL to generate guidance by incorporating a theory-of-mind of the players significantly improves the players' ability to achieve goals grounded in their shared world.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1928474
- PAR ID:
- 10463285
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Volume:
- 1
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 11136 to 11155
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.624
