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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A Triangle Generative Adversarial Network ( @math -GAN) is developed for semi-supervised cross-domain joint distribution matching, where the training data consists of samples from each domain, and supervision of domain correspondence is provided by only a few paired samples. @math -GAN consists of four neural networks, two generators and two discriminators. The generators are designed to learn the two-way conditional distributions between the two domains, while the discriminators implicitly define a ternary discriminative function, which is trained to distinguish real data pairs and two kinds of fake data pairs. The generators and discriminators are trained together using adversarial learning. Under mild assumptions, in theory the joint distributions characterized by the two generators concentrate to the data distribution. In experiments, three different kinds of domain pairs are considered, image-label, image-image and image-attribute pairs. Experiments on semi-supervised image classification, image-to-image translation and attribute-based image generation demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.