Local Agentic Theory For Mobile Games — Shafik Quoraishee & Joanne Song, The New York Times

AI Engineer · 18 min · 171 sentences · from YouTube's caption track

Each timecode opens YouTube at the start of that sentence. Line anchors (#s42) are the cue ids in the WebVTT, and every line carries its start and end seconds. All transcripts has every talk, and the whole corpus as one file.

00:01[music]
00:12Awesome.
00:12So, yes, as great introduction took us to we are going to be talking about local agentic theory for accessible mobile games.
00:21And we realize this is the graph track, but there are graphs here in this presentation.
00:25So, fret not if you're missing them.
00:28So, yeah.
00:30So, a few disclaimers before we continue.
00:33Since we we do work at The New York Times and there's a few things we have to say about our puzzles AI etc. Our puzzles are made by people.
00:40They're not made by AI.
00:41So, that's just a thing we this true and it'll always be true.
00:47There's no AI in the games themselves.
00:49So, there's no AI features.
00:51You might have seen Wordle Bot, that's not an AI feature.
00:54There's so all our games are are pretty much AI free.
00:58And the work that we're going to be talking about now is experimental work.
01:03So, it's stuff that we look at in terms of solvability and other capabilities of agents in the space that we can potentially take advantage of on a local device to to do other things than actually generate games more so things about playability and other kinds of features we can
01:20utilize agents for in an intelligent way.
01:23So, introduce a little bit of an introduction.
01:26So, I also if anyone has seen the last year's World Fair talk that I did on connections, there's a similar vibe to this.
01:36I did a deeper dive into how a solver can be built for that game.
01:40And if you're interested, you can take a look.
01:42It's on YouTube and it has a lot of interesting deeper dive specifics for RL solvers, which I'll go into in a bit as well.
01:50So, little bit of a history.
01:52Everybody here and just in case you aren't familiar with AI in gaming, which for you know, it's not the most common topic here at at the World's Fair right now, but
02:03if you are familiar with the history of it, AI has been in games for a long time.
02:08And since this is since the '80s, it's been established as a core pattern in games like Pac-Man.
02:16This is a simple version of an AI called a finite state machine.
02:19And if anybody everyone's familiar with a finite state machine here, probably.
02:23I would imagine enough people are.
02:25It's a basic AI system which tells the ghosts in the game what to do when Pac-Man gets a dot or not.
02:33But basically it is a conditional kind of symbolic AI.
02:38And then moving forward we'll talk more about RL and the advancements of where that went to.
02:43But firstly, the core thesis of what we're going to really focus on is the model of running the devices running AI on our local devices.
02:54So most AI infrastructure today runs really on the cloud and if you're running mobile application, most practical scenarios involve cloud architecture.
03:05And that that essentially is expensive because you have AI calls and inference calls that you have to make upstream and then they have to come to your device.
03:13So there's things like latency, etc. So in an ideal world when we evolve to that place, we can offload a lot of the intelligence onto a device.
03:24What that does is make a lot of the make a lot of the calls faster when we get to that world because you're not doing a round trip to the cloud to get that information.
03:33So you can actually compress that time to the time within the device frame computation.
03:39That it's private, too.
03:41So your AI computation is with on it's within the device itself.
03:46And if it's set up properly, it won't leave the device because there's some things that for the gameplay experience that you don't actually need it to leave the device.
03:53Local computation is the way to go and it stays within your confined security zone uh locally.
03:58And uh it's not needed upstream for telemetry or anything like that.
04:02Um and then it should work anywhere.
04:04So, one thing is that games uh you know, some a lot of games rely on the internet and and many they they will for a live con- connection point, but at least in in the in many cases where you need advanced AI compute,
04:17you can develop games that can work locally on your uh machine, on your mobile device, rather.
04:23And uh that's great because if you're in a subway tunnel or something like that, you can still have a a game with a very smart AI that is um building uh
04:31doing something uh without being disrupted due to um uh HTTP calls that are not getting through.
04:38Um And then it's uh again, the personalization is a big thing in general with on-device models because personalization is important.
04:46Uh and a lot of people want their game experience to be tailored to them.
04:49And in the world where we can do things um on device, we have that capability more so because the the features are local.
04:57So, now we're going to talk about agentic AI for games.
05:01And um as I'm sure everybody's familiar with AlphaGo, AlphaZero, etc. here.
05:07Um the Alpha series models.
05:09So, basically um a reinforcement learning was the way that uh games were in the past um trained in order to uh do intelligence, right?
05:20So, basically what you would do is that you would take a you take a model, uh have many iterations, and then that uh that model would then um be really tuned to a particular game.
05:31Um and that's still happening, but uh what I'm doing is setting up the kind of history in the school of thought of that uh all the way up to 2024.
05:38Um has anybody heard of EfficientZero before here?
05:42Uh if not, it's fine.
05:44EfficientZero and EfficientZero V2 are the reinforcement models uh reinforcement learning models that are state-of-the-art um and they're called sample efficient reinforcement learning models because they learn uh very fast with a lot of a lot less data than traditional reinforcement learning models do on games.
06:01Um and there's just uh so that was up to 2024 and that that uh mechanic is continuing, but it lives alongside uh our reinforcement learning and agentic game uh development.
06:14So, uh reinforcement learning, again, is on the left is a bunch of cycles that are used to train a model in order to change its weight so it becomes more intelligent and able to play a particular game.
06:25An agentic system is one where you actually have a game that is a negotiated by agents, which are essentially language models, which are using in-context learning to figure out the state of the world in the game.
06:38So, RL changes the model itself and changes the weights in the model.
06:42Um the agentic system reasons over a space in the game, um and there's no reward system to grind out.
06:49Uh the loop There's an agentic loop that's at play, which then learns the system through tool calls and other things that are local to the device and using local device functionality and adapts to a new situation.
07:01So, it's much more dynamic.
07:03So, um So, this is uh basically one example of an agentic-based game using Have everybody seen Space Invaders before?
07:10I I presume.
07:12Okay.
07:12Well, if not, you will There it is.
07:14So, this is a agentic version of Space Invaders, which um is designed to use a local agentic framework which we worked on to um do basically the basic things like kill the spaceships as they get close and avoid the bullets as the spaceships attack.
07:30And you've probably seen simulations where our models have been trained to do the same thing, but this is specifically an agentic system that we built to actually play this game.
07:39Um and then you You see the agentic states on the right.
07:42And so, this is the inside the agent itself and how the loop works.
07:46So, basically, you have a very few basic states where you're trying to perceive what's happening in this where the agent is trying to perceive what's happening in the scene, where it's trying to predict the next move of the spaceships attacking it, where it's deciding
07:58what to do next because if the bullet is too close or if the spaceship is too close, it will take a it will make some sort of action and then it will act in that
08:06way in the appropriate way and then loop again and then see the state.
08:09So, that's a very simple system, but it's it's basically a simple agent that's using an on-device model to actually execute its steps.
08:18So, some challenges in this space are space
08:21[snorts]
08:22is health is a challenge because on the device you have a limited amount of resources.
08:26You have a device budget where you have to fit the weights, you have to compress the state history of the agent, you have to compress the working set or the planning artifacts of the agent if you even think of the way that an agent will create the way that it navigates a system,
08:39and you have to have enough render headroom in order to actually render the game and play the game itself.
08:44So, this is basically that.
08:46And then, you also have a time constraint because time itself is budgeted in a particular way so that you are essentially using like a refresh rate of 60 Hz.
08:56So, in each frame that passes, you have to which you get a new frame every 16 ms a pound if your refresh rate is 60 Hz.
09:03You need to actually fit the agent planning within that, and if you go outside of that budget, what will happen in the agent execution, you're going to see jank and other things on mobile devices that that are very hard to
09:14pull out.
09:15And then, you have energy constraints, and energy constraints are basically battery life.
09:19So, battery life you know, the basic devi- devices these days are not optimized to um really handle agentic workloads.
09:27Uh yet, they're getting to that point where you have NPUs, neural processing units, and AI chips that are specifically designed to handle that inference, but at this point in time, um
09:37the agentic design of the loop on the device has to be very curated to do as minimum energy processing as possible, otherwise your phones die fast as it is and they'll die even faster.
09:49So essentially there's a constraint function in of this for example constraint graph that takes into account all three of these areas and so there's different ways of managing the constraints in this constraint graph so you can actually
10:02make sure that your agent is performing well.
10:04So you can handle space constraints, time constraints, energy constraints and there's some techniques that we use to optimize those constraints so that we're not we're we're penalizing over focus on one area and then we're using like soft constraining on another area so that we're not penalizing
10:20too much if we need a little extra space but if we use too much time, we want to penalize that because we don't want the agent to disrupt the user experience.
10:29So we we look at things like gaze estimation models as well because gaze is another new factor.
10:36It's been around for a while but it's evolving to the point where it can actually um be useful and an agent has to take into account gaze model data which is basically
10:46convolutional neural net which takes gaze data and then can translate it to agentic behavior.
10:53And so it just begs to mention that we need to consider things like the Arc AGI score because we also have the base intelligence of the model and the base intelligence of a lot of these models aren't
11:04capable yet of being fully cognizant of all the complex decisions that an agent can make in the most intelligent and possibly interesting games in the future but we have to
11:15essentially surmount this to get to that point.
11:18And the last thing I'll show you before I hand it over to Joanne is this is another agent that we built to solve the mini crosswords.
11:25So if you play the mini crosswords, this is called a constraint satisfaction agent which uses a satisfaction graph to figure out how to put the words in the crossword puzzle at the right place so that um that it fills the puzzle properly.
11:38And it backtracks in the puzzle and finds the right word, sometimes finds the wrong word, but the constraint graph here is optimized so that if the constraints are getting too um
11:49uh too crowded or too incorrect, then it will backtrack efficiently and the agent can use natural language from the graph to backtrack and find the correct crossword uh crossword layout.
11:59Um so basically where we now, we have a lot of different models that we are considering.
12:05So we have generalist models um like for example Google Seema, which will be the agentic framework uh agentic framework that can do a lot of different things in this space.
12:13Um we have agents that do visual estimation on the phone.
12:17Uh and then we have ins- entire generative worlds that are being built using AI.
12:22Um and that will be a whole different interesting agentic space to consider.
12:25Now I'll hand it over to Joanne to talk about accessibility.
12:30Oh, is this thing on?
12:31Yes.
12:32Um let's talk about accessibility.
12:34How can we build a system that truly serves everyone?
12:37Um like Shafiq mentioned, traditionally games live in a world of fixed state models, rigid, hand-authored.
12:44A player's choice is often limited to a toggle or a static menu.
12:47The flaw here, as you could have guessed, is that it's entirely deterministic, predictable, and completely blind to the real-time needs.
12:56But we don't need to reinvent the wheel here to battle to build the battle-tested accessible game.
13:01We ground our design in an existing international standard, WCAG 2.2. This framework evaluates interactions across four human-centric pillars.
13:10Is this experience perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust?
13:15Giving us a proven global foundation to build our dynamic player states.
13:21But you can't have rules without breaking them.
13:23Some common pitfalls where our break these standards.
13:26A mobile game like crosswords, as an example.
13:29There are motor challenges we come across where tiny grid cells can lead to mistaps, active cell highlights are invisible to low vision players, uh cognitive barriers can be forcing manual logins or timers that are unforgiving
13:41and alienating to process speed uh to processing speed needs.
13:45A static easy mode can't fix a crossword grid that remains fundamentally blind to our players.
13:52Although it's still in draft, WCAG 3.0, spoiler alert, is following the trends of dropping the binary pass/fail to a graded bronze, silver, and gold scoring.
14:02Accessibility is developing into a more diverse scale and moving away from our standard checkbox.
14:07The same shift should apply for gameplay.
14:11This scale visualizes the values that can change depending on the needs of the player.
14:17Here we have the core dials that scale depending on the player's real-time needs.
14:24If we tune for a player needing more assistance, we have input tolerance that controls the flexibility around physical constraints, making interactions more forgiving.
14:33The step granularity adjusts for the number of operations in a sequence, helping users break complex tasks and tuning to players who needs more nuance.
14:41The agent's time The agent's entire job is to dynamically calculate these dials as they rise and fall together, balancing the scale against the player's live context.
14:58With on-device models, the agent can get a real-time feel for how the player is doing.
15:02For example, we can use vision models to track eye gaze and figure out when the user might be facing search friction, analyze shaky taps for someone having a hard time with controls,
15:11meet players where they're at by allow by allowing handwriting recognition.
15:17Um focus traps.
15:18But we don't want the agent to just watch, we want it to act.
15:21We simulate on the right um well, the simulation on the right is a broken dialogue forcing a user into a keyboard trap.
15:28For a user using a switch or a keyboard instead of touch, focus order is very important.
15:34If we have a broken dialogue, tab and focus can be an endless loop with no way to navigate back.
15:39Here the agent can monitor that focus path, flag the loop, and inject an exit route live on the device.
15:48When you're navigating with limited dexterity or just fat fingers, tiny targets can mean a miss.
15:54Instead of using players instead of making players play operation, our agent is a live layout auditor.
16:01It measures the interface on the fly, catches violations, and dynamically resizes the controls.
16:07The agent rewrites the layout live adapting to the human and not the other way around.
16:13Think of it like a real-time tug-of-war where the system is no longer fixed but tunes the game to the player.
16:19Accessibility and challenge stop being treated separately and become two ends of one dial constantly tuning for the moment.
16:28Ultimately, this is uh there this is where on-device AI is heading.
16:32By building systems that can actively sense human frustrations, we can move past fixed menus and turn our devices into responsive empathetic partners.
16:42But there's still groundwork to be laid.
16:44Looking ahead for local agents to truly understand games, there's still a lot we need to build.
16:49First, they have to be faster.
16:51We need a plan we need plans and decisions within a 16-ms frame to prevent stuttering for games.
16:57We need models to predict the game so that we can see exactly what a layout change will do before they actually make it.
17:03And the real magic though will be the long-term memory learning one specific person's unique habits and needs over time.
17:10We need a shared game state language so one agent can work across multiple games instead of being rebuilt from scratch for different releases releases.
17:18And then finally, we need better chips and honest testing.
17:22Faster chips paired with real benchmarks to prove that the agent makes things better.
17:28And the future of AI doesn't have to be one giant centralized brain.
17:32It can be billions of small local brains, each running on a personal device, each shaped entirely by the individual it serves.
17:40Thank you.
17:43[applause]
17:44[cheering]
17:45Woo!
18:01[music]