Feint Behaviors and Strategies: Formalization, Implementation and Evaluation

Abstract

Feint behaviors refer to a set of deceptive behaviors in a nuanced manner, which enable players to obtain temporal and spatial advantages over opponents in competitive games. Such behaviors are crucial tactics in most competitive multi-player games (e.g., boxing, fencing, basketball, motor racing, etc.). However, existing literature does not provide a comprehensive (and/or concrete) formalization for Feint behaviors, and their implications on game strategies. In this work, we introduce the first comprehensive formalization of Feint behaviors at both action-level and strategy-level, and provide concrete implementation and quantitative evaluation of them in multi-player games. The key idea of our work is to (1) allow automatic generation of Feint behaviors via Palindrome-directed templates, combine them into meaningful behavior sequences via a Dual-Behavior Model; (2) concertize the implications from our formalization of Feint on game strategies, in terms of temporal, spatial, and their collective impacts respectively; and (3) provide a unified implementation scheme of Feint behaviors in existing MARL frameworks. The experimental results show that our design of Feint behaviors can (1) greatly improve the game reward gains; (2) significantly improve the diversity of Multi-Player Games; and (3) only incur negligible overheads in terms of time consumption.