mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Player-1: Learning to Play from Synthetic Experience

arXiv 2610.20584 ↗First posted 14 Oct 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.HCcited by 0

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Reinforcement learning for LLM agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-use agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in interpreting screens and executing keyboard and mouse actions. However, games, with their visually rich worlds and diverse mechanics, remain challenging and offer a demanding next step toward general digital control. Current game-agent learning pipelines often rely on large-scale demonstrations with limited coverage of dynamic game states, while scalable environments for interactive training remain difficult to obtain. We introduce Player-1, a post-training framework for learning game control beyond demonstrations through synthetic experience. We extend the computer-use action space with relative pointer motion, sustained inputs, and composite actions. For supervised initialization, we fine-tune computer-use models on 6,044 curated gameplay trajectories that pair recorded actions with task instructions and visual reasoning. We construct Player-1-Gym, sixteen synthetic 2D and 3D environments designed around control demands shared across games. Programmatically verifiable rewards and randomized observations and control dynamics support multi-environment reinforcement learning with PPO. The resulting Player-1-9B and Player-1-35B-A3B improve MineDojo-300 success over their SFT policies by 27.8 and 17.7 percentage points, respectively. Player-1-9B reaches 38.33% success compared with 12.63% for the strongest evaluated baseline, with further gains over SFT on ViZDoom-10 and GameWorld. Further analyses show that broader synthetic environment coverage improves transfer, while the use of composite actions that combine multiple keyboard and mouse inputs increases during RL. We demonstrate that learning from synthetic experience substantially improves game control beyond supervised initialization, with gains that generalize beyond the RL training suite.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for LLM agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 31 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

Builds on

31 of 35 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Agentic Game Development as a Verifiable Trajectory Data Engine for Scaling World Models26 Aug
  2. 2026CUA-Gym: Scaling Verifiable Training Environments and Tasks for Computer-Use Agents25 May
  3. 2026GameWorld: Towards Standardized and Verifiable Evaluation of Multimodal Game Agents8 Apr
  4. 2026RLAnything: Forge Environment, Policy, and Reward Model in Completely Dynamic RL System2 Feb
  5. 2026NitroGen: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Gaming Agents4 Jan
  6. 2025SIMA 2: A Generalist Embodied Agent for Virtual Worlds4 Dec
  7. 2025Lumine: An Open Recipe for Building Generalist Agents in 3D Open Worlds12 Nov
  8. 2025Game-TARS: Pretrained Foundation Models for Scalable Generalist Multimodal Game Agents27 Oct
  9. 2022MineDojo: Building Open-Ended Embodied Agents with Internet-Scale Knowledge17 Jun

Other references · 22

  1. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,820
  2. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  3. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  4. 2025UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agentscited by 610
  5. 2022Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videoscited by 345
  6. 2025UI-TARS-2 Technical Report: Advancing GUI Agent with Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 215
  7. 2016ViZDoom: A Doom-based AI Research Platform for Visual Reinforcement Learningcited by 179
  8. 2024Cradle: Empowering Foundation Agents Towards General Computer Controlcited by 117
  9. 2024Scaling Instructable Agents Across Many Simulated Worldscited by 71
  10. 2024The Dawn of GUI Agent: A Preliminary Case Study with Claude 3.5 Computer Usecited by 63
  11. 2026Agent-World: Scaling Real-World Environment Synthesis for Evolving General Agent Intelligencecited by 54
  12. 2025JARVIS-VLA: Post-Training Large-Scale Vision Language Models to Play Visual Games with Keyboards and Mousecited by 28
10 more
  1. 2026GameDevBench: Evaluating Agentic Capabilities Through Game Developmentcited by 28
  2. 2025Code World Models for General Game Playingcited by 26
  3. 2026GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?cited by 22
  4. 2026SPADE: Self-Play in Adaptive Synthetic Executable Environmentscited by 12
  5. 2026Scaling Behavior Cloning Improves Causal Reasoning: An Open Model for Real-Time Video Game Playingcited by 11
  6. 2026Qwen-CUA: Native Computer Use for (almost) Everythingcited by 8
  7. 2025D2E: Scaling Vision-Action Pretraining on Desktop Data for Transfer to Embodied AIcited by 4
  8. 2026Odysseus: Scaling VLMs to 100+ Turn Decision-Making in Games via Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  9. 2026AI for Games in the Foundation Model Eracited by 3
  10. 2026GameWAM: A World Action Model for Video Gamescited by 1

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2020Benchmarking End-to-End Behavioural Cloning on Video Games
  2. 2023Promptable Game Models: Text-Guided Game Simulation via Masked Diffusion Models
  3. 2025UBCL: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Controllable and Diverse Player Behaviors
  4. 2023Mimicking To Dominate: Imitation Learning Strategies for Success in Multiagent Competitive Games
  5. 2026AgentGarten: Code Worlds for Evolving Agents
  6. 2026GameDirector: Decoupling Gameplay Logic from Rendering for Player-Configurable Game World Models
  7. 2024Autoverse: An Evolvable Game Language for Learning Robust Embodied Agents
  8. 2026GameBoyWorlds: A Testbed for Self-Improvement in Embodied Video Games