EA1966年成立于英国Chester市,早期是英国电力行业的研发中心。1990年代私有化,现为国际化的电力咨询与服务公司。
Video-based quality assurance (QA) for long-form gameplay video is labor-intensive and error-prone, yet valuable for assessing game stability and visual correctness over extended play sessions. Vision language models (VLMs) promise general-purpose visual reasoning capabilities and thus appear attractive for detecting visual bugs directly from video frames. Recent benchmarks suggest that VLMs can achieve promising results in detecting visual glitches on curated datasets. Building on these findings, we conduct a real-world study using industrial QA gameplay videos to evaluate how well VLMs perform in practical scenarios. Our study samples keyframes from long gameplay videos and asks a VLM whether each keyframe contains a bug. Starting from a single-prompt baseline, the model achieves a precision of 0.50 and an accuracy of 0.72. We then examine two common enhancement strategies used to improve VLM performance without fine-tuning: (1) a secondary judge model that re-evaluates VLM outputs, and (2) metadata-augmented prompting through the retrieval of prior bug reports. Across 100 videos totaling 41 hours and 19,738 keyframes, these strategies provide only marginal improvements over the simple baseline, while introducing additional computational cost and output variance. Our findings indicate that off-the-shelf VLMs are already capable of detecting a certain range of visual bugs in QA gameplay videos, but further progress likely requires hybrid approaches that better separate textual and visual anomaly detection.
World modeling is an unsettled field: architectures, training objectives, and state representations interact in complex ways, and no single recipe dominates across environments. This makes it an ideal testbed for AI coding agents acting as autonomous researchers–a setting in which the improvement direction is not specified in advance, unlike the engineering-to-spec tasks that dominate current agent benchmarks. We introduce AutoWorldModel-Bench, a closed-loop benchmark in which frontier coding agents autonomously improve a provided world-model starter under a fixed compute budget. The benchmark spans eight game environments under a unified structured-state representation–ground-truth entity state extracted from each game and consumed through a shared tensor format–which isolates dynamics modeling from perception and enables minutes-per-run iteration. Across 64 sessions, Codex-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 improve their starter on 63; in 91
Testing is a major effort for the gaming industry, requiring a significant part of development budget and people power. We present a case study on a development version of the ice hockey game EA SPORTS NHL 26, for which human playtesters test the goalie AI for behavioral exploits. To reduce the effort of re-testing the goalie AI after every game or behavior modification in the development phase, we propose Reward-Adaptive Iterative Discovery (RAID), a novel approach to automatically find exploits using an iterative Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach that trains a population of goal scoring agents. While previous approaches can already successfully find exploits, RL algorithms tend to overfit to a single solution. We introduce a simple extension on top of existing RL algorithms, such that they find multiple diverse high-quality solutions. For our first deployment of this approach, within a single experiment we were able to find six hockey scoring exploit strategies that were qualitatively similar to those that playtesters had found in hours-long manual testing sessions.
Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.
High-quality facial animation retargeting is crucial in digital entertainment production, enabling the transfer of animations from a source rig to a target rig. To avoid the need of manual transfer, automatic retargeting methods can be employed. However, creating universal methods remains challenging due to varying rig and topologies. We propose a novel retargeting method based on the idea that any facial expression can be decomposed into a weighted sum of Facial Action Coding System (FACS) poses. Our method assumes that these decompositions transfer across rigs with minimal need of refinement. We utilize a machine learning model to extract FACS weights from source frames. This model is trained solely on source animation data, requiring no target data or complex correspondence mappings. After a refinement step, these weights are then applied to the target rig’s FACS poses. Our technique supports seamless animation transfer across different rigs while allowing for artistic modifications by adjusting individual FACS poses. Our experiments demonstrate that this method produces high-quality retargeted animations and outperforms other retargeting methods. We explore how different design choices impact retargeting quality and showcase artistic control of asymmetries. By simplifying the workflow for rigged heads, this flexible framework enhances production efficiency while maintaining artistic control.