@inproceedings{lu-etal-2025-cultivating,
    title = "Cultivating Gaming Sense for Yourself: Making {VLM}s Gaming Experts",
    author = "Lu, Wenxuan  and
      He, Jiangyang  and
      Zhang, Zhanqiu  and
      Guo, Steven Y.  and
      Zang, Tianning",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.643/",
    pages = "13132--13152",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "Developing agents capable of fluid gameplay in first/third-person games without API access remains a critical challenge in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Recent efforts leverage Vision Language Models (VLMs) as direct controllers, frequently pausing the game to analyze screens and plan action through language reasoning. However, this inefficient paradigm fundamentally restricts agents to basic and non-fluent interactions: relying on isolated VLM reasoning for each action makes it impossible to handle tasks requiring high reactivity (e.g., FPS shooting) or dynamic adaptability (e.g., ACT combat). To handle this, we propose a paradigm shift in gameplay agent design: instead of direct control, VLM serves as a developer, creating specialized execution modules tailored for tasks like shooting and combat. These modules handle real-time game interactions, elevating VLM to a high-level developer. Building upon this paradigm, we introduce GameSense, a gameplay agent framework where VLM develops task-specific game sense modules by observing task execution and leveraging vision tools and neural network training pipelines. These modules encapsulate action-feedback logic, ranging from direct action rules to neural network-based decisions. Experiments demonstrate that our framework is the first to achieve fluent gameplay in diverse genres, including ACT, FPS, and Flappy Bird, setting a new benchmark for game-playing agents."
}