The development of game agents holds a critical role in advancing towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The progress of LLMs and their multimodal counterparts (MLLMs) offers an unprecedented opportunity to evolve and empower game agents with human-like decision-making capabilities in complex computer game environments. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of LLM-based game agents from a holistic viewpoint. First, we introduce the conceptual architecture of LLM-based game agents, centered around six essential functional components: perception, memory, thinking, role-playing, action, and learning. Second, we survey existing representative LLM-based game agents documented in the literature with respect to methodologies and adaptation agility across six genres of games, including adventure, communication, competition, cooperation, simulation, and crafting & exploration games. Finally, we present an outlook of future research and development directions in this burgeoning field.

Well-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) treat all test samples equally during prediction. Adaptive DNN inference with early exiting leverages the observation that some test examples can be easier to predict than others. This paper presents EENet, a novel early-exiting scheduling framework for multi-exit DNN models. Instead of having every sample go through all DNN layers during prediction, EENet learns an early exit scheduler, which can intelligently terminate the inference earlier for certain predictions, which the model has high confidence of early exit. As opposed to previous early-exiting solutions with heuristics-based methods, our EENet framework optimizes an early-exiting policy to maximize model accuracy while satisfying the given per-sample average inference budget. Extensive experiments are conducted on four computer vision datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, Cityscapes) and two NLP datasets (SST-2, AgNews). The results demonstrate that the adaptive inference by EENet can outperform the representative existing early exit techniques. We also perform a detailed visualization analysis of the comparison results to interpret the benefits of EENet.