AIJan 8
Scaling Behavior Cloning Improves Causal Reasoning: An Open Model for Real-Time Video Game PlayingYuguang Yue, Irakli Salia, Samuel Hunt et al.
Behavior cloning has seen a resurgence as scaling model and data sizes demonstrate strong performance. In this work, we introduce an open recipe for training a video game playing foundation model designed for inference in realtime on a consumer GPU. We release all data (8300+ hours of high quality human gameplay), training and inference code, and pretrained checkpoints under an open license. Empirically, we show that our best model achieves performance competitive with human players across a variety of 3D games. We use this recipe to investigate the scaling laws of behavior cloning, with a focus on causal reasoning. In a controlled toy setting, we first demonstrate that increasing training data and network depth leads to the model learning a more causal policy. We then validate these findings at scale, analyzing models up to 1.2 billion parameters. We observe that the causal improvements seen in the toy domain hold true as model size and training steps increase.
CVAug 19, 2025
Pixels to Play: A Foundation Model for 3D GameplayYuguang Yue, Chris Green, Samuel Hunt et al.
We introduce Pixels2Play-0.1 (P2P0.1), a foundation model that learns to play a wide range of 3D video games with recognizable human-like behavior. Motivated by emerging consumer and developer use cases - AI teammates, controllable NPCs, personalized live-streamers, assistive testers - we argue that an agent must rely on the same pixel stream available to players and generalize to new titles with minimal game-specific engineering. P2P0.1 is trained end-to-end with behavior cloning: labeled demonstrations collected from instrumented human game-play are complemented by unlabeled public videos, to which we impute actions via an inverse-dynamics model. A decoder-only transformer with auto-regressive action output handles the large action space while remaining latency-friendly on a single consumer GPU. We report qualitative results showing competent play across simple Roblox and classic MS-DOS titles, ablations on unlabeled data, and outline the scaling and evaluation steps required to reach expert-level, text-conditioned control.