Publications

This page lists all of my scientific publications. They are sorted by publication type, and within each publication type sorted in the reverse order of publication date.

Journal Articles

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Jakub Kowalski, Éric Piette, Achille Morenville, and Walter Crist (2024). “GameTable Working Group 1 meeting report on search, planning, learning, and explainability”. ICGA Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 28–35. IOS Press.

• Jakub Kowalski, Elliot Doe, Mark H.M. Winands, Daniel Górski, and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2024). “Proof Number Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search”. IEEE Transactions on Games, in press. IEEE. [pdf preprint]

• Éric Piette, Walter Crist, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Lisa Rougetet, Summer Courts, Tim Penn, and Achille Morenville (2024). “GameTable COST action: kickoff report”. ICGA Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 11–27. IOS Press.

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Vegard Mella, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Cameron Browne and Olivier Teytaud (2023). “Towards a General Transfer Approach for Policy-Value Networks”. Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

• Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson and Cameron Browne (2023). “The 2022 Ludii AI competition”. ICGA Journal, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 16–27. IOS Press.

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson and Cameron Browne (2023). “Spatial State-Action Features for General Games”. Artificial Intelligence, vol. 321. Elsevier.

• Walter Crist and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2023). “The Digital Ludeme Project: Combining Archaeological and Computational Methods for the Study of Ancient Board Games”. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, vol 49. Elsevier.

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Spyridon Samothrakis, Éric Piette and Matthew Stephenson (2023). “Extracting Tactics Learned from Self-Play in General Games”. Information Sciences, vol. 624, pp. 277–298. Elsevier.

• Cameron Browne, Éric Piette, Walter Crist, Matthew Stephenson and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2022). “Report on the 2nd Digital Ludeme Project Workshop”. ICGA Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 56–66. IOS Press.

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Vegard Mella, Cameron Browne and Olivier Teytaud (2022). “Deep Learning for General Game Playing with Ludii and Polygames”. ICGA Journal, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 146–161. IOS Press.

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Walter Crist and Cameron Browne (2019). “Report on the Digital Ludeme Project”. ICGA Journal, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 138–142. IOS Press.

• Raluca D. Gaina, Adrian Couëtoux, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Mark H.M. Winands, Tom Vodopivec, Florian Kirchgeßner, Jialin Liu, Simon M. Lucas, and Diego Pérez-Liébana (2017). “The 2016 Two-Player GVGAI Competition”. IEEE Transactions on Games, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 209–220. IEEE. [pdf]

Book Chapters

• Walter Crist, Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson, and Cameron Browne (2024). “Computational Approaches for Recognising and Reconstructing Ancient Games: The Case of Ludus Latrunculorum”. In Games in the Ancient World: Places, Spaces, Accessories, (eds. A. Pace, T. Penn, U. Schädler), volume 79 of Monographies Instrumentum, pp. 63–80, Dremil-Lafage, Éditions Mergoil.

• Cameron Browne, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2023). “Ludii General Game System for Modeling, Analyzing, and Designing Board Games”. In Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games, (eds. N. Lee). Springer, Cham.

Conference Articles

• Dominic Sagers, Mark H. M. Winands, and Dennis J. N. J. Soemers (2024). “Anytime Sequential Halving in Monte-Carlo Tree Search”. In Computers and Games 2024. Accepted. [pdf preprint]

• Alexander G. Padula and Dennis J. N. J. Soemers (2024). “Exploring RL-based LLM Training for Formal Language Tasks with Programmed Rewards”. In BNAIC/BeNeLearn 2024. Accepted. [pdf] [pdf preprint]

• Graham Todd, Alexander Padula, Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, and Julian Togelius (2024). “GAVEL: Generating Games Via Evolution and Language Models”. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024). Accepted. [pdf preprint]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Guillaume Bams, Max Persoon, Marco Rietjens, Dimitar Sladić, Stefan Stefanov, Kurt Driessens, and Mark H.M. Winands (2024). “Towards a Characterisation of Monte-Carlo Tree Search Performance in Different Games”. In 2024 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2024), pp. 1–4. [pdf preprint]

• Spyridon Samothrakis, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Damian Machlanski (2024). “Games of Knightian Uncertainty as AGI testbeds”. In 2024 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2024), pp. 1–4. [pdf preprint]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, and Cameron Browne (2024). “The Ludii Game Description Language is Universal”. In 2024 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2024), pp. 1–8. [pdf preprint]

• Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, and Cameron Browne (2023). “Measuring Board Game Distance”. In Browne, C., Kishimoto, A, and Schaeffer, J., editors, Computers and Games 2022 (CG 2022), pp. 121–130. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13865. Springer, Cham. [pdf preprint]

• Elliot Doe, Mark H.M. Winands, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2022). “Combining Monte-Carlo Tree Search with Proof-Number Search”. In 2022 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2022), pp. 206–212. [pdf preprint]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, and Cameron Browne (2022). “Optimised Playout Implementations for the Ludii General Game System”. In Browne, C., Kishimoto, A., and Schaeffer, J., editors, Advances in Computer Games (ACG 2021), pp. 223–234. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13262. Springer, Cham. [pdf preprint]

• Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2022). “Automatic Generation of Board Game Manuals”. In Browne, C., Kishimoto, A., and Schaeffer, J., editors, Advances in Computer Games (ACG 2021), pp. 211–222. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13262. Springer, Cham. [pdf preprint]

• Cameron Browne, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2022). “General Board Geometry”. In Browne, C., Kishimoto, A., and Schaeffer, J., editors, Advances in Computer Games (ACG 2021), pp. 235–246. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13262. Springer, Cham. [pdf preprint]

• Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, and Cameron Browne (2021). “General Game Heuristic Prediction Based on Ludeme Descriptions”. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2021), pp. 878–881. [pdf preprint]

• Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2021). “General Board Game Concepts”. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2021), pp. 932–939. [pdf preprint]

• Cameron Browne, Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2020). “A Practical Introduction to the Ludii General Game System”. In Advances in Computer Games (ACG 2019), volume 12516 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Springer, Cham.

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, and Cameron Browne (2020). “Manipulating the Distributions of Experience used for Self-Play Learning in Expert Iteration”. In 2020 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2020), pp. 245–252. [pdf preprint]

• Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson, Chiara F. Sironi, Mark H.M. Winands, and Cameron Browne (2020). “Ludii - The Ludemic General Game System”. In Giacomo, G. D., Catala, A., Dilkina, B., Milano, M., Barro, S., Bugarín, A., and Lang, J., editors, 2020 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 325 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, pp. 411–418. IOS Press. [pdf]

• Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Ludii as a Competition Platform”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 634–641. [pdf]

• Matthew Stephenson, Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2019). “An Overview of the Ludii General Game System”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 864–865. [pdf]

• Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2019). “An Empirical Evaluation of Two General Game Systems: Ludii and RBG”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 626–629. [pdf]

• Cédric Piette, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Ludii and XCSP: Playing and Solving Logic Puzzles”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 630–633. [pdf]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Learning Policies from Self-Play with Policy Gradients and MCTS Value Estimates”. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (COG 2019), pp. 329–336. Runner-up Best Paper Award. [pdf] [pdf (preprint)]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Biasing MCTS with Features for General Games”. In 2019 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2019), pp. 442–449. [pdf (preprint)]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Tim Brys, Kurt Driessens, Mark H.M. Winands, and Ann Nowé (2018). “Adapting to Concept Drift in Credit Card Transaction Data Streams Using Contextual Bandits and Decision Trees”. In Thirtieth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-18), pp. 7831-7836. AAAI Press. [pdf] [pdf mirror]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Chiara F. Sironi, Torsten Schuster, and Mark H.M. Winands (2016). “Enhancements for Real-Time Monte-Carlo Tree Search in General Video Game Playing”. In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2016), pp. 436-443. IEEE. Best Student Paper Award. [pdf]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers and Mark H.M. Winands (2016). “Hierarchical Task Network Plan Reuse for Video Games”. In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2016), pp. 1-8. IEEE. [pdf]

Workshop Articles

• Cameron Browne, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Eric Piette (2019). “Strategic Features for General Games”. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Knowledge Extraction from Games (KEG), pp. 70–75. [pdf] [pdf mirror]

National Conference Articles

• Éric Piette, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Matthew Stephenson, Chiara F. Sironi, Mark H.M. Winands, and Cameron Browne (2019). “Ludii - Le Système Ludémique de General Game Playing”. In Conférence Nationale en Intelligence Artificielle. (In French) [pdf]

Reports

• Cameron Browne, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Michael Conrad, Walter Crist, Thierry Depaulis, Eddie Duggan, Fred Horn, Steven Kelk, Simon M. Lucas, João Pedro Neto, David Parlett, Abdallah Saffidine, Ulrich Schädler, Jorge Nuno Silva, Alex de Voogt, and Mark H. M. Winands (2019). “Foundations of Digital Archæoludology”. [Online]. Available: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13516. [pdf]

Theses

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2023). “Learning State-Action Features for General Game Playing”. Ph.D. thesis. Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2016). “Enhancements for Real-Time Monte-Carlo Tree Search in General Video Game Playing”. M.Sc. thesis. Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands. [pdf]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2014). “Tactical Planning Using MCTS in the Game of StarCraft”. B.Sc. thesis. Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands. [pdf]

Other

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Vegard Mella, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Cameron Browne and Olivier Teytaud (2024). Towards a General Transfer Approach for Policy-Value Networks”. BNAIC/BeNeLearn 2024, Accepted. (Encore Abstract) [pdf]

• Walter Crist, Cameron Browne and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2022). “Spelen uit de klassieke oudheide reconstrueren: het Digital Ludeme Project”. Hermeneus, vol. 94(4), pp. 7–15. Nederlands Klassiek Verbond. In Dutch.

• Eric Piette, Lisa Rougetet, Walter Crist, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, and Cameron Browne (2021). “A Ludii analysis of the French Military Game”. Board Game Studies (BGS 2021), Paris, France. [pdf]

• Éric Piette, Cameron Browne and Dennis J.N.J. Soemers (2021). “Ludii Game Logic Guide”. [pdf]

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson and Cameron Browne (August 12, 2019). “Ludii User Guide”.

• Dennis J.N.J. Soemers, Chiara F. Sironi, Torsten Schuster, and Mark H.M. Winands (2016). “Enhancements for Real-Time Monte-Carlo Tree Search in General Video Game Playing”. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 184-185. (Extended Abstract)