Papers › Playing Pokémon Red via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Playing Pokémon Red via Deep Reinforcement Learning

27 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.19920archive 2025-07-28

Marco Pleines, Daniel Addis, David Rubinstein, Frank Zimmer, Mike Preuss, Peter Whidden

Pok\'emon Red, a classic Game Boy JRPG, presents significant challenges as a testbed for agents, including multi-tasking, long horizons of tens of thousands of steps, hard exploration, and a vast array of potential policies. We introduce a simplistic environment and a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) training methodology, demonstrating a baseline agent that completes an initial segment of the game up to completing Cerulean City. Our experiments include various ablations that reveal vulnerabilities in reward shaping, where agents exploit specific reward signals. We also discuss limitations and argue that games like Pok\'emon hold strong potential for future research on Large Language Model agents, hierarchical training algorithms, and advanced exploration methods. Source Code: https://github.com/MarcoMeter/neroRL/tree/poke_red

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