# Efficient Exploration via First-Person Behavior Cloning Assisted Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.12774 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12774/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05363/) (2017)
- [Exploration by Random Network Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12894/) (2018)
- [Improving Playtesting Coverage via Curiosity Driven Reinforcement Learning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13798/) (2021)
- [Deep sequential models for sampling-based planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00804/) (2018)
- [Taking the Scenic Route: Automatic Exploration for Videogames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03125/) (2018)
- [Exploring Gameplay With AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06962/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Go-Explore Complex 3D Game Environments for Automated Reachability Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00570/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern day computer games have extremely large state and action spaces. To detect bugs in these games' models, human testers play the games repeatedly to explore the game and find errors in the games. Such gameplay is exhaustive and time consuming. Moreover, since robotics simulators depend on similar methods of model specification and debugging, the problem of finding errors in the model is of interest to the robotics community to ensure robot behaviors and interactions are consistent in simulators. Previous methods have used reinforcement learning arXiv:2103.13798 and search based methods (Chang, 2019, (Chang, 2021) arXiv:1811.06962 including Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) to explore a game's state-action space to find bugs. However, such search and exploration based methods are not efficient at exploring the state-action space without a pre-defined heuristic. In this work we attempt to combine a human-tester's expertise in solving games, and the RRT's exhaustiveness to search a game's state space efficiently with high coverage. This paper introduces Cloning Assisted RRT (CA-RRT) to test a game through search. We compare our methods to two existing baselines: 1) a weighted-RRT as described by arXiv:1812.03125; 2) human demonstration seeded RRT as described by Chang et. al. We find CA-RRT is applicable to more game maps and explores more game states in fewer tree expansions/iterations when compared to the existing baselines. In each test, CA-RRT reached more states on average in the same number of iterations as weighted-RRT. In our tested environments, CA-RRT reached the same number of states as weighted-RRT by more than 5000 fewer iterations on average, almost a 50% reduction and applied to more scenarios than. Moreover, as a consequence of our first person behavior cloning approach, CA-RRT worked on unseen game maps than just seeding the RRT with human demonstrated states.