Pixels to Play: A Foundation Model for 3D Gameplay
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Abstract (arXiv)
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.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 19 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2025.
Builds on
19 of 27 references.
References · 19
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7 more
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 2.
3 papers.