Many real-world games do not admit a fixed, compact rule set: instead, their dynamics are defined by interactions among a large and often evolving collection of game pieces, making general-purpose policy learning impractical. Magic: the Gathering (MTG) exemplifies this setting, where the cards themselves define and alter gameplay rules, strategic constraints, and long-term outcomes, while the pool of available cards is ever-changing. We study Draft, a constrained deck-building format of MTG in which eight players make 39-45 sequential selections from semi-random packs to construct a 40-card deck under partial information. By isolating the card selection process from gameplay, Draft provides a tractable yet non-trivial setting for studying decision-making driven by combinatorial card synergies. We propose an encoder-based model that produces set-contextualized card embeddings to encode the draft decision sequence, with a consistent improvement over linear baselines on large-scale real-world data, establishing a first learned benchmark for outcome prediction in MTG Draft. Our code is available at github.com/akulen/MtGDraftEncoder.
Andrzej Białecki, Adam Mastalerz, Han Zhoucs.LG cs.AI
Recent advances in reinforcement learning have produced superhuman agents across a wide range of competitive games. As a byproduct, researchers have begun studying how these agents play, extracting behavioral representations, analyzing decision structure, and modeling the latent geometry of expert performance. However, this growing body of work has overwhelmingly focused on defeating human players rather than providing feedback, leaving a critical gap in creating model solutions to improve human players. Unlike chess and Go, where AI has become integral to player training, real-time strategy (RTS) games lack principled frameworks for translating expert knowledge into actionable feedback. We introduce Latent Maps of Performance, a framework for counterfactual path generation. We focus on StarCraft~II data to model player improvement as an algorithmic recourse within a learned representation space. As inspiration for our work, we have looked at the championship model used in sports science. We trained a Guided Variational Autoencoder model on 23,305 professional tournament replays, enabling counterfactual traversal between losing and winning gameplay profiles. To fulfill our goal, we have devised and verified four traversal strategies on out-of-distribution (OOD) data randomly sampled from a dataset of amateur replays, namely linear interpolation, iterative optimal transport, density-regularized gradient ascent, and neural flow matching, each designed to generate multi-step improvement trajectories that remain grounded in observed expert behavior while moving a player's profile toward winning configurations. Feedback is extracted at multiple granularities to support players at different stages of improvement. Finally, we conclude that there is a trade-off between the path-finding methods we employ and hope that future research will focus on developing model solutions for human improvement.
In competitive first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Counter-Strike 2 (CS2), account-integrity review often asks whether an account's recent behavior remains consistent with its historical operator. This consistency question arises in cases such as temporary substitution, rank boosting, and high-skill players using lower-ranked accounts, where manual review requires comparing a current match against multiple historical matches. We formulate this review task as same-player verification: we encode the behavioral trajectory of a single player in a match replay (demo) as a demo-player behavioral fingerprint, and train a model to judge whether two behavioral observations come from the same real player. Using CS2-specific domain knowledge, the fingerprints cover crosshair control, movement-stop-fire coordination, economy/buy, combat/engagement, and temporal rhythm. We construct strict six-fold evaluations on the Perfect dataset (3,570 demos and 35,700 demo-player observations) and the Professional dataset (539 demos and 5,390 demo-player observations). The final pairwise model reaches ROC AUCs of 0.926 and 0.956, respectively. Feature analysis shows that the strongest identity signals come from aiming/crosshair and other low-level mechanical behaviors, indicating that stable mechanics are more informative for this verification task than single-match performance outcomes. On fixed eligible query cohorts, aggregating pairwise evidence between a current demo and multiple historical demos raises account-history AUC on Perfect from 0.923 at K=1 to 0.982 at K=10, and on Professional from 0.914 at K=1 to 0.975 at K=5. These results show that CS2 demo behavior can support supervised same-player verification and account-level identity-consistency modeling through multi-demo history aggregation.
In competitive games, players frequently switch strategies after losing streaks, yet our analysis of 926,334 match records from 34,619 Clash Royale players reveals a counterintuitive pattern: switching frequency is inversely associated with the win rate, with effects that vary substantially across players and situational contexts. We attribute this to a limitation common in many prior recommendation systems, which evaluate strategies by expected quality while overlooking the behavioral cost of switching and individual differences in switching propensity. We refer to this implicit premise as the Zero Switching Cost Assumption. To address this, we reformulate strategy recommendation as a transition-level decision problem and instantiate it as TQP (Transition Quality Predictor), a three-stage pipeline structured as Who -> When -> What. PersonaGate suppresses recommendations for players whose strategic consistency is empirically associated with superior outcomes. TimingGate identifies moments when switching is likely to yield a net benefit over staying, using a subtype- and state-matched baseline to control for natural win-rate recovery. ScoreFusion ranks candidate strategies by combining an adoptability signal with predicted transition quality (delta WR). We further introduce SwitchGap, an evaluation metric that measures a policy's discriminative quality without treating observed player choices as optimal ground truth. This property is particularly important because the most frequent switchers record the lowest win rates. The full pipeline achieves a SwitchGap of +10.4 percentage points at a recommendation rate of 5.4%, and loss-triggered switchers, despite being the lowest-performing group, benefit the most from subtype-conditioned guidance.