AlphaZero in Sparsely Rewarded Games: Limits and Auxiliary Supervision
We study this gap in two oracle-evaluable domains with contrasting structure: Connect Four, a solved partisan game with exact game-theoretic values, and Chomp, an impartial game whose optimal play is governed by Grundy-number structure. Under a unified self-play $+$ MCTS pipeline, we compare vanilla AlphaZero, a multi-frame variant (limited to Chomp), and an AlphaZero Auxiliary Loss (AZAL) that adds oracle-derived policy supervision. We find that vanilla AlphaZero achieves strong play across both domains but cannot preserve the exact trajectories required for optimal play: in Connect Four, it fails to maintain the optimal line of play, while in Chomp, it fails to consistently restore the $g=0$ invariant.
- ▪We study this gap in two oracle-evaluable domains with contrasting structure: Connect Four, a solved partisan game with exact game-theoretic values, and Chomp, an impartial game whose optimal play is governed by Grundy-number structure.
- ▪Under a unified self-play $+$ MCTS pipeline, we compare vanilla AlphaZero, a multi-frame variant (limited to Chomp), and an AlphaZero Auxiliary Loss (AZAL) that adds oracle-derived policy supervision.
- ▪We find that vanilla AlphaZero achieves strong play across both domains but cannot preserve the exact trajectories required for optimal play: in Connect Four, it fails to maintain the optimal line of play, while in Chomp, it fails to consis
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| Original publisher | arXiv cs.AI |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08984 |
| Publication time | Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-13T04:20:37.625Z |
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Computer Science > Machine Learning arXiv:2607.08984 (cs) [Submitted on 9 Jul 2026] Title:AlphaZero in Sparsely Rewarded Games: Limits and Auxiliary Supervision Authors:Brent Kong, Tejas Ram, Tony Yue Yu View a PDF of the paper titled AlphaZero in Sparsely Rewarded Games: Limits and Auxiliary Supervision, by Brent Kong and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:AlphaZero has demonstrated that a neural-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search can achieve superhuman performance, but strong play does not necessarily imply perfect play. We study this gap in two oracle-evaluable domains with contrasting structure: Connect Four, a solved partisan game with exact game-theoretic values, and Chomp, an impartial game whose optimal play is governed by Grundy-number structure.
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