Reinforcement learning has successfully learned to play challenging board and video games. However, its generalization ability remains under-explored. The General Video Game AI Learning Competition aims at designing agents that are capable of learning to play different games levels that were unseen during training. This paper presents the games, entries and results of the 2020 General Video Game AI Learning Competition, held at the Sixteenth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature and the 2020 IEEE Conference on Games. Three new games with sparse, periodic and dense rewards, respectively, were designed for this competition and the test levels were generated by adding minor perturbations to training levels or combining training levels. In this paper, we also design a reinforcement learning agent, called Arcane, for general video game playing. We assume that it is more likely to observe similar local information in different levels rather than global information. Therefore, instead of directly inputting a single, raw pixel-based screenshot of current game screen, Arcane takes the encoded, transformed global and local observations of the game screen as two simultaneous inputs, aiming at learning local information for playing new levels. Two versions of Arcane, using a stochastic or deterministic policy for decision-making during test, both show robust performance on the game set of the 2020 General Video Game AI Learning Competition.

A team of Fugro employees has won a global competition in geotechnical machine-learning. Competing with 60 other teams from industry and academia around the world, the Fugro team came first in the pile-driving prediction event organised as part of the International Symposium on Frontiers in Offshore Geotechnics (ISFOG) 2020 conference, which will be held in Austin, Texas, in August. The competition ran from April to December 2019, and ended on 1 January 2020, when it was announced that Fugro had won.

Every year there is a brand new reinforcement learning competition. This usually consists of new organizers, and a new website! Instead of replacing the old website every year and breaking hundreds of links, we use a different subdomain each year. So, this page will always exist at: http://rl-competition.org And the specific websites for different years are: NIPS Reinforcement Learning Workshop: Benchmarks and Bakeoffs NIPS Reinforcement Learning Workshop: Benchmarks and Bakeoffs II ICML Reinforcement Learning and Benchmarking Event NIPS Workshop: The First Annual Reinforcement Learning Competition The 2008 Reinforcement Learning Competition:: http://2008.rl-competition.org