News

Queen Mary University of London's Game AI Group had a standout presence at the prestigious IEEE Conference on Games (IEEE CoG) 2025, held 26–29 August in Milan. The conference is one of the world's leading venues for research on video games, board games and game-related technologies.

The group published an impressive five papers (four full and two short), with two full papers nominated for the Best Paper Award. The paper "Bootstrap Your Own Teacher: Online Policy Distillation for Multi-Game Reinforcement Learning" – led by Donal Byrne and co-authored by colleagues including Queen Mary's Marko Tot – went on to win the award, marking a major achievement for the team. Marko, an IGGI PhD student in the Game AI Group, carried out this work while on placement at Instadeep.

The team also celebrated recognition beyond their own papers. Simon Lucas, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and head of the Game AI Group, was presented with an Outstanding Contribution Award for co-founding the IEEE Conference on Games in 2005 (originally the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games), and for founding the IEEE Transactions on Games journal.

Contributions at IEEE CoG 2025:

• Full Papers
  • JSON-Bag: A generic game trajectory representation – Dien Nguyen, Diego Perez Liebana and Simon Lucas
  • (Best Paper Nomination) How Task Complexity Moderates the Impact of AI-Generated Images on User Experience in Gamified Text Labelling – Fatima Althani, Chris Madge and Massimo Poesio
  • (Best Paper Nomination and Winner) Bootstrap Your Own Teacher: Online Policy Distillation for Multi-Game Reinforcement Learning – Donal Byrne, Marko Tot, Paul Duckworth, Clement Bonnet, Alexandre Laterre and Thomas Barrett
• Short Papers
  • Play-Style Identification Using Low-Level Representations of Play Traces in MicroRTS – Ruizhe Yu Xia, Jeremy Gow and Simon Lucas
  • Constraint Propagation for Reasoning in Single-player Deduction Games – Fandi Meng, Kaijie Xu and Simon Lucas
• Competitions
  • PlanetWars AI Challenge – Simon Lucas
  • Tabletop Games Balancing Competition – George Long

These successes showcase the Queen Mary Game AI Group's international reputation at the forefront of artificial intelligence and games research, and their continuing influence in shaping the future of the field.

And a big thank you to our IGGI CDT for their help and support with this.