Table of Links ABSTRACT ABSTRACT ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION 1 INTRODUCTION 1 INTRODUCTION 2 INTERACTIVE WORLD SIMULATION 2 INTERACTIVE WORLD SIMULATION 2 INTERACTIVE WORLD SIMULATION 3 GAMENGEN 3 GAMENGEN 3 GAMENGEN 3.1 DATA COLLECTION VIA AGENT PLAY 3.2 TRAINING THE GENERATIVE DIFFUSION MODEL 4 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP 4 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP 4 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP 4.1 AGENT TRAINING 4.2 GENERATIVE MODEL TRAINING 5 RESULTS 5 RESULTS 5 RESULTS 5.1 SIMULATION QUALITY 5.2 ABLATIONS 6 RELATED WORK 6 RELATED WORK 6 RELATED WORK 7 DISCUSSION, ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND REFERENCES 7 DISCUSSION, ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND REFERENCES 7 DISCUSSION, ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND REFERENCES Summary Summary We introduced GameNGen, and demonstrated that high-quality real-time game play at 20 frames per second is possible on a neural model. We also provided a recipe for converting an interactive piece of software such as a computer game into a neural model. Limitations. GameNGen suffers from a limited amount of memory. The model only has access to a little over 3 seconds of history, so it’s remarkable that much of the game logic is persisted for drastically longer time horizons. While some of the game state is persisted through screen pixels (e.g. ammo and health tallies, available weapons, etc.), the model likely learns strong heuristics that allow meaningful generalizations. For example, from the rendered view the model learns to infer the player’s location, and from the ammo and health tallies, the model might infer whether the player has already been through an area and defeated the enemies there. That said, it’s easy to create situations where this context length is not enough. Continuing to increase the context size with our existing architecture yields only marginal benefits (Section 5.2.1), and the model’s short context length remains an important limitation. The second important limitation are the remaining differences between the agent’s behavior and those of human players. For example, our agent, even at the end of training, still does not explore all of the game’s locations and interactions, leading to erroneous behavior in those cases. Limitations Future Work Future Work We demonstrate GameNGen on the classic game DOOM. It would be interesting to test it on  directions yet and much more work is required here, but we are excited to try! Hopefully this small step will someday contribute to a meaningful improvement in people’s experience with video games, or maybe even more generally, in day-to-day interactions with interactive software systems. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We’d like to extend a huge thank you to Eyal Segalis, Eyal Molad, Matan Kalman, Nataniel Ruiz, Amir Hertz, Matan Cohen, Yossi Matias, Yael Pritch, Danny Lumen, Valerie Nygaard, the Theta Labs and Google Research teams, and our families for insightful feedback, ideas, suggestions, and support.other games or more generally on other interactive software systems; We note that nothing in our technique is DOOM specific except for the reward function for the RL-agent. We plan on addressing that in a future work; While GameNGen manages to maintain game state accurately, it isn’t perfect, as per the discussion above. A more sophisticated architecture might be needed to mitigate these; GameNGen currently has a limited capability to leverage more than a minimal amount of memory. Experimenting with further expanding the memory effectively could be critical for more complex games/software; GameNGen runs at 20 or 50 FPS2 on a TPUv5. It would be interesting to experiment with further optimization techniques to get it to run at higher frame rates and on consumer hardware. Towards a New Paradigm for Interactive Video Games Towards a New Paradigm for Interactive Video Games Today, video games are programmed by humans. GameNGen is a proof-of-concept for one part of a new paradigm where games are weights of a neural model, not lines of code. GameNGen shows that an architecture and model weights exist such that a neural model can effectively run a complex game (DOOM) interactively on existing hardware. While many important questions remain, we are hopeful that this paradigm could have important benefits. For example, the development process for video games under this new paradigm might be less costly and more accessible, whereby games could be developed and edited via textual descriptions or examples images. A small part of this vision, namely creating modifications or novel behaviors for existing games, might be achievable in the shorter term. For example, we might be able to convert a set of frames into a new playable level or create a new character just based on example images, without having to author code. Other advantages of this new paradigm include strong guarantees on frame rates and memory footprints. We have not experimented with these  directions yet and much more work is required here, but we are excited to try! Hopefully this small step will someday contribute to a meaningful improvement in people’s experience with video games, or maybe even more generally, in day-to-day interactions with interactive software systems. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We’d like to extend a huge thank you to Eyal Segalis, Eyal Molad, Matan Kalman, Nataniel Ruiz, Amir Hertz, Matan Cohen, Yossi Matias, Yael Pritch, Danny Lumen, Valerie Nygaard, the Theta Labs and Google Research teams, and our families for insightful feedback, ideas, suggestions, and support. CONTRIBUTION CONTRIBUTION • Dani Valevski: Developed much of the codebase, tuned parameters and details across the system, added autoencoder fine-tuning, agent training, and distillation. • Yaniv Leviathan: Proposed project, method, and architecture, developed the initial implementation, key contributor to implementation and writing. • Moab Arar: Led auto-regressive stabilization with noise-augmentation, many of the ablations, and created the dataset of human-play data. • Shlomi Fruchter: Proposed project, method, and architecture. Project leadership, initial implementation using DOOM, main manuscript writing, evaluation metrics, random policy data pipeline. 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Dani Valevski
Yaniv Leviathan
Moab Arar
Shlomi Fruchter Authors: Dani Valevski
Yaniv Leviathan
Moab Arar
Shlomi Fruchter Dani Valevski Dani Valevski Yaniv Leviathan Yaniv Leviathan Moab Arar Moab Arar Shlomi Fruchter Shlomi Fruchter This paper is available on arxiv under CC by 4.0 Deed (Attribution 4.0 International) license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC by 4.0 Deed (Attribution 4.0 International) license. available on arxiv available on arxiv

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