Human characters with a broad range of natural looking and physically realistic behaviors will enable the construction of compelling interactive experiences. In this paper, we develop a technique for learning controllers for a large set of heterogeneous behaviors. By dividing a reference library of motion into clusters of like motions, we are able to construct experts , learned controllers that can reproduce a simulated version of the motions in that cluster. These experts are then combined via a second learning phase, into a general controller with the capability to reproduce any motion in the reference library. We demonstrate the power of this approach by learning the motions produced by a motion graph constructed from eight hours of motion capture data and containing a diverse set of behaviors such as dancing (ballroom and breakdancing), Karate moves, gesturing, walking, and running.

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has attracted great attention in designing controllers for physics-based characters. Despite the recent success of DRL, the learned controller is viable for a single character. Changes in body size and proportions require learning controllers from scratch. In this paper, we present a new method of learning parametric controllers for body shape variation. A single parametric controller enables us to simulate and control various characters having different heights, weights, and body proportions. The users are allowed to create new characters through body shape parameters, and they can control the characters immediately. Our characters can also change their body shapes on the fly during simulation. The key to the success of our approach includes the adaptive sampling of body shapes that tackles the challenges in learning parametric controllers, which relies on the marginal value function that measures control capabilities of body shapes. We demonstrate parametric controllers for various physically simulated characters such as bipeds, quadrupeds, and underwater animals.

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Fig. 1. Characters performing two-player competitive sports such as boxing (left) and fencing (right) using learned control strategies.In two-player competitive sports, such as boxing and fencing, athletes often demonstrate efficient and tactical movements during a competition. In this paper, we develop a learning framework that generates control policies for physically simulated athletes who have many degrees-of-freedom. Our framework uses a two step-approach, learning basic skills and learning boutlevel strategies, with deep reinforcement learning, which is inspired by the way that people how to learn competitive sports. We develop a policy model based on an encoder-decoder structure that incorporates an autoregressive latent variable, and a mixture-of-experts decoder. To show the effectiveness of our framework, we implemented two competitive sports, boxing and fencing, and demonstrate control policies learned by our framework that can generate both tactical and natural-looking behaviors. We also evaluate the control policies with comparisons to other learning configurations and with ablation studies.