In plain words: Agents are trained to judge how well any action fits any requested style, so a player can steer how a task is done while it happens. In racing, combat, and humanoid walking, the agents followed the chosen style and still finished the job, unlike usual training that locks in one fixed behavior.
Abstract · Coachable agents for interactive gameplay
Reinforcement learning has proven to be a valuable tool in the creation of advanced AI and robotic systems, contributing to everything from game playing to robotics to foundation models. Through trial-and-error, these AI systems typically learn one, near-optimal behavior to solve their tasks. However, there are many use cases in which one would like to assert some level of control, preferably in real time, over how the task is solved. We refer to these modifications of a core task as styles. We combine universal value function approximators (UVFAs) with carefully selected training scenarios, learning algorithms, and data augmentation to create a framework for coaching agents that exhibit styles in complex domains. We demonstrate the framework's application in the AAA video games Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo, and in an open-source humanoid test domain. Despite the different nature of the domains -- car racing, stylized game combat, and humanoid walking -- each agent shows strong coherence to the style requests while still satisfying the main task in its domain. Importantly, the techniques outlined in this paper allow an end user to choose the final behavior at run time, giving them flexible control over the final executed performance.
Roberto Capobianco, Harm van Seijen, Nolan D. Bard, Neil Burch, Fatima Davelouis, Josh Davidson, Alisa Devlic, Yunshu Du, Ishan Durugkar, Siddhant Gangapurwala, Daniel Hernandez, G. Zacharias Holland, et al.
arXiv:2607.00642 · cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jul 1, 2026 · updated Aug 10, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Source code: https://github.com/SonyResearch/coachable_agents - Videos: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19F5uKziT_zkDurze5sy5iMFD4BHfD3lV