Teaching AI Agent to Play Poker Strategically Through Preference Optimization
A poker agent can make a legal move and still make a strategically poor one. We ask whether compact AI agents can exhibit strategic behavior under hidden information and whether preference optimization can improve beyond static and zero-shot policies. We first evaluate a static baseline and three frozen language models: SmallThinker, Qwen3, and Gemma-3 whose performance varies substantially between exact-game and six-player evaluation. We therefore propose Strategic Preference Optimization with KL-anchored Equilibrium (SPOKE), combining teacher-relative value penalties, policy anchoring, risk constraints, and structured rationale supervision, and compare it with SFT, DPO, GRPO, and GSPO. ...
| Authors | Phurinat Polasa, Thanapon Thanadunpremdet, Phatthanasak Kraiduang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 21 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.