Computer-use agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in interpreting screens and executing keyboard and mouse actions. However, games, with their visually rich worlds and diverse mechanics, remain challenging and offer a demanding next step toward general digital control. Current game-agent learning pipelines often rely on large-scale demonstrations with limited coverage of dynamic game states, while scalable environments for interactive training remain difficult to obtain. We introduce Player-1, a post-training framework for learning game control beyond demonstrations through synthetic experience. We extend the computer-use action space with relative pointer motion, sustained inputs, and composite actions. For supervised initialization, we fine-tune computer-use models on 6,044 curated gameplay trajectories that pair recorded actions with task instructions and visual reasoning. We construct Player-1-Gym, sixteen synthetic 2D and 3D environments designed around control demands shared across games. Programmatically verifiable rewards and randomized observations and control dynamics support multi-environment reinforcement learning with PPO. The resulting Player-1-9B and Player-1-35B-A3B improve MineDojo-300 success over their SFT policies by 27.8 and 17.7 percentage points, respectively. Player-1-9B reaches 38.33% success compared with 12.63% for the strongest evaluated baseline, with further gains over SFT on ViZDoom-10 and GameWorld. Further analyses show that broader synthetic environment coverage improves transfer, while the use of composite actions that combine multiple keyboard and mouse inputs increases during RL. We demonstrate that learning from synthetic experience substantially improves game control beyond supervised initialization, with gains that generalize beyond the RL training suite.
This publication proposes a definition and a classification of agile software development approaches and analyses ten software development methods that can be characterized as being "agile" against the defined criterion.
P. Abrahamsson, O. Salo, Jussi Ronkainen et al.· arXiv.org· 727 citations· ⚡54
The study shows that agile practices improve both informal and formal communication, but indicates that, in larger development situations involving multiple external stakeholders, a mismatch of adequate communication mechanisms can sometimes even hinder the communication.
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The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.
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Known for his clear and elegant writing style, Bertsekas shaped fields from control and optimization to large-scale computation and artificial intelligence.
Jennifer Neville did not want to go into computer science—but that’s exactly where she landed. Neville discusses the starts and stops that led to her professional sweet spot and her work identifying “surprising failures” making it hard for AI to handle complexity. The post What AI gets wrong and what failure teaches us appeared first on Microsoft Research.