RIDGE: State-Conditioned Reward Blending for Behavioral Coverage in Deep RL Game Agents

Computer Science > Machine Learning

[Submitted on 3 Nov 2026]

Title:RIDGE: State-Conditioned Reward Blending for Behavioral Coverage in Deep RL Game Agents

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:A deep RL agent trained on a fixed persona reward plays one way: an Explorer keeps exploring while starving, a Survivor hoards on an empty map. Since each persona fixes its own reward, automated playtesting trains N agents for N styles. Changing reward composition mid-episode runs into the switching-stability dilemma: PPO degrades under non-stationary rewards. We present RIDGE, a single-agent architecture that sidesteps the dilemma with two design choices: a state-conditioned blender that computes softmax-normalized sigmoid weights from slow-moving state variables, and a multi-head critic that trains one value head per persona on its own stationary signal. On Crafter with four personas, one \ridge agent acquires both branches of the wood-tier crafting/combat split that no fixed-persona baseline solves jointly, and a sharpness ablation confirms state-conditioning drives the gain. We position these results as demonstrations of the blending mechanism's dynamics across n=3 seeds per condition; larger multi-seed sweeps remain future work.

Submission history

From: Kevin Christopher Chua [view email][v1] Tue, 3 Nov 2026 20:41:36 UTC (138 KB)

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