Benchmarking End-to-End Behavioural Cloning on Video Games
  Behavioural cloning, where a computer is taught to perform a task based on
demonstrations, has been successfully applied to various video games and
robotics tasks, with and without reinforcement learning. This also includes
end-to-end approaches, where a computer plays a video game like humans do: by
looking at the image displayed on the screen, and sending keystrokes to the
game. As a general approach to playing video games, this has many inviting
properties: no need for specialized modifications to the game, no lengthy
training sessions and the ability to re-use the same tools across different
games. However, related work includes game-specific engineering to achieve the
results. We take a step towards a general approach and study the general
applicability of behavioural cloning on twelve video games, including six
modern video games (published after 2010), by using human demonstrations as
training data. Our results show that these agents cannot match humans in raw
performance but do learn basic dynamics and rules. We also demonstrate how the
quality of the data matters, and how recording data from humans is subject to a
state-action mismatch, due to human reflexes.
