← Search

Daniel Hennes

12 accepted papers

2026

Code World Models for General Game Playing

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning abilities are increasingly being applied to classical board and card games, but the dominant approach---involving prompting for direct move generation---has significant drawbacks. It relies on the model's implicit fragile pattern-matching capabilities, leading…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Combining Deep Reinforcement Learning and Search with Generative Models for Game-Theoretic Opponent Modeling

IJCAI 2025

Opponent modeling methods typically involve two crucial steps: building a belief distribution over opponents' strategies, and exploiting this opponent model by playing a best response. However, existing approaches typically require domain-specific heurstics to come up with such a model, and algorith

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Mastering Board Games by External and Internal Planning with Language Models

ICML 2025spotlight

Advancing planning and reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the key prerequisites towards unlocking their potential for performing reliably in complex and impactful domains. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate this across board games (Chess, Fischer Random / Chess960, Co…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2022

NeuPL: Neural Population Learning

ICLR 2022poster

Learning in strategy games (e.g. StarCraft, poker) requires the discovery of diverse policies. This is often achieved by iteratively training new policies against existing ones, growing a policy population that is robust to exploit. This iterative approach suffers from two issues in real-world games…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2021

Which priors matter? Benchmarking models for learning latent dynamics

NeurIPS 2021poster

Learning dynamics is at the heart of many important applications of machine learning (ML), such as robotics and autonomous driving. In these settings, ML algorithms typically need to reason about a physical system using high dimensional observations, such as images, without access to the underlying…

Cited by 33SourcecodeScholar
2020

A Generalized Training Approach for Multiagent Learning

ICLR 2020talk

This paper investigates a population-based training regime based on game-theoretic principles called Policy-Spaced Response Oracles (PSRO). PSRO is general in the sense that it (1) encompasses well-known algorithms such as fictitious play and double oracle as special cases, and (2) in principle appl…

Cited by 127SourcecodeScholar
2020

Fast computation of Nash Equilibria in Imperfect Information Games

ICML 2020poster

We introduce and analyze a class of algorithms, called Mirror Ascent against an Improved Opponent (MAIO), for computing Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum games, both in normal form and in sequential form with imperfect information. These algorithms update the policy of each player with a mirror…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2019

Active Multi-Contact Continuous Tactile Exploration with Gaussian Process Differential Entropy

ICRA 2019poster

In the present work, we propose an active tactile exploration framework to obtain a surface model of an unknown object utilizing multiple contacts simultaneously. To incorporate these multiple contacts, the exploration strategy is based on the differential entropy of the underlying Gaussian process…

Cited by 32SourceScholar
2019

Planning Approximate Exploration Trajectories for Model-Free Reinforcement Learning in Contact-Rich Manipulation

RA-L 2019

Recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled simulated agents to learn complex behavior policies from scratch, but their data complexity often prohibits real-world applications. The learning process can be sped up by expert demonstrations but those can be costly to acquire. We demonstr

Cited by 25SourceScholar
2018

Learning to Control Redundant Musculoskeletal Systems with Neural Networks and SQP: Exploiting Muscle Properties

ICRA 2018poster

Modeling biomechanical musculoskeletal systems reveals that the mapping from muscle stimulations to movement dynamics is highly nonlinear and complex, which makes it difficult to control those systems with classical techniques. In this work, we not only investigate whether machine learning approache…

Cited by 32SourceScholar
2017

Gaussian process estimation of odometry errors for localization and mapping

ICRA 2017poster

Since early in robotics the performance of odometry techniques has been of constant research for mobile robots. This is due to its direct influence on localization. The pose error grows unbounded in dead-reckoning systems and its uncertainty has negative impacts in localization and mapping (i.e. SLA…

Cited by 35SourceScholar
2017

NOctoSLAM: Fast octree surface normal mapping and registration

IROS 2017poster

In this paper, we introduce a SLAM front end called NOctoSLAM. The approach adopts an octree-based map representation that implicitly enables source and reference data association for point to plane ICP registration. Additionally, the data structure is used to group map points to approximate surface…

Cited by 6SourceScholar