Ubisoft AI Teaches Itself to Drive

The Ubisoft researchers evaluated their algorithm on three environments designed to benchmark reinforcement learning systems, including a simple platformer-like game and two soccer-based games. They claim that its performance fell slightly short of industry-leading techniques, which they attribute to an architectural quirk. But they say that in a separate test, they successfully used it to train a video game vehicle with two continuous actions (acceleration and steering) and one binary discrete action (hand brake), the objective being to follow a given path as quickly as possible in environments the agent didn’t encounter during training.