Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a machine learning approach capable of generating novel example outputs across a space of provided training examples. Procedural Content Generation (PCG) of levels for video games could benefit from such models, especially for games where there is a pre-existing corpus of levels to emulate. This paper trains a GAN to generate levels for Super Mario Bros using a level from the Video Game Level Corpus. The approach successfully generates a variety of levels similar to one in the original corpus, but is further improved by application of the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). Specifically, various fitness functions are used to discover levels within the latent space of the GAN that maximize desired properties. Simple static properties are optimized, such as a given distribution of tile types. Additionally, the champion A* agent from the 2009 Mario AI competition is used to assess whether a level is playable, and how many jumping actions are required to beat it. These fitness functions allow for the discovery of levels that exist within the space of examples designed by experts, and also guide the search towards levels that fulfill one or more specified objectives.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were first introduced by Goodfellow @cite_6 in 2014. Their training process can be seen as a two-player adversarial game in which a generator @math (faking samples decoded from a random noise vector) and a discriminator @math (distinguishing real fake samples and outputting 0 or 1) are trained at the same time by playing against each other. The discriminator @math aims at minimizing the probability of mis-judgment, while the generator @math aims at maximizing that probability. Thus, the generator is trained to deceive the discriminator by generating samples that are good enough to be classified as genuine. Training ideally reaches a steady state where @math reliably generates realistic examples and @math is no more accurate than a coin flip.
@cite_6
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Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been shown to be able to sample impressively realistic images. GAN training consists of a saddle point optimization problem that can be thought of as an adversarial game between a generator which produces the images, and a discriminator, which judges if the images are real. Both the generator and the discriminator are commonly parametrized as deep convolutional neural networks. The goal of this paper is to disentangle the contribution of the optimization procedure and the network parametrization to the success of GANs. To this end we introduce and study Generative Latent Optimization (GLO), a framework to train a generator without the need to learn a discriminator, thus avoiding challenging adversarial optimization problems. We show experimentally that GLO enjoys many of the desirable properties of GANs: learning from large data, synthesizing visually-appealing samples, interpolating meaningfully between samples, and performing linear arithmetic with noise vectors.