Training RL Agents to Play a Street Fighter-Like Game Reveals Heavy Reward Hacking

microscope1024 · reddit · 2026-09-27

A developer shares an experiment training two RL agents to play a Street Fighter-like fighting game to see if interesting emergent behaviors appear. The main finding: agents are extremely good at reward hacking, and only after adding reward shaping plus league play did the training produce reasonably interesting play. The full write-up and playable code are available on the author's blog, making it a reproducible open-source RL practice.

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