{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/deep-surrogate-assisted-map-elites-for","title":"Deep Surrogate Assisted MAP-Elites for Automated Hearthstone Deckbuilding","arxiv_id":"2112.03534","date":"2021-12-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yulun Zhang","Matthew C. Fontaine","Amy K. Hoover","Stefanos Nikolaidis"],"abstract":"We study the problem of efficiently generating high-quality and diverse content in games. Previous work on automated deckbuilding in Hearthstone shows that the quality diversity algorithm MAP-Elites can generate a collection of high-performing decks with diverse strategic gameplay. However, MAP-Elites requires a large number of expensive evaluations to discover a diverse collection of decks. We propose assisting MAP-Elites with a deep surrogate model trained online to predict game outcomes with respect to candidate decks. MAP-Elites discovers a diverse dataset to improve the surrogate model accuracy, while the surrogate model helps guide MAP-Elites towards promising new content. In a Hearthstone deckbuilding case study, we show that our approach improves the sample efficiency of MAP-Elites and outperforms a model trained offline with random decks, as well as a linear surrogate model baseline, setting a new state-of-the-art for quality diversity approaches in automated Hearthstone deckbuilding. We include the source code for all the experiments at: https://github.com/icaros-usc/EvoStone2.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03534v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.03534v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"deep-surrogate-assisted-map-elites-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/icaros-usc/evostone2","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2112.03534","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}