A Multimodal Architecture for Endpoint Position Prediction in Team-based Multiplayer Games

Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract --Understanding and predicting player movement in multiplayer games is crucial for achieving use cases such as player-mimicking bot navigation, preemptive bot control, strategy recommendation, and real-time player behavior analytics. However, the complex environments allow for a high degree of navigational freedom, and the interactions and team-play between players require models that make effective use of the available heterogeneous input data. This paper presents a multimodal architecture for predicting future player locations on a dynamic time horizon, using a U-Net -based approach for calculating endpoint location probability heatmaps, conditioned using a multimodal feature encoder . The application of a multi-head attention mechanism for different groups of features allows for communication between agents. In doing so, the architecture makes efficient use of the multimodal game state including image inputs, numerical and categorical features, as well as dynamic game data. Consequently, the presented technique lays the foundation for various downstream tasks that rely on future player positions such as the creation of player-predictive bot behavior or player anomaly detection. Predicting the future position of players in team-based video game environments is important for a variety of tasks such as AI-based decision-making, strategy optimization of bots, and real-time player behavior analysis. However, such predictions can be challenging, especially in dynamic game environments with complex interactions between multiple entities. Besides applications in video games, the task of location prediction has found wide-ranging interest in domains such as robotics [1], autonomous driving [2], and sports analytics [3].