FightLadder: A Benchmark for Competitive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Wenzhe Li, Zihan Ding, Seth Karten, Chi Jin
2/12/2026

No official code found. Best implementation: wenzhe-li/FightLadder (38 stars, MIT, last commit 2024-07-23).

Abstract

Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) heavily rely on a variety of well-designed benchmarks, which provide environmental platforms and consistent criteria to evaluate existing and novel algorithms. Specifically, in multi-agent RL (MARL), a plethora of benchmarks based on cooperative games have spurred the development of algorithms that improve the scalability of cooperative multi-agent systems. However, for the competitive setting, a lightweight and open-sourced benchmark with challenging gaming dynamics and visual inputs has not yet been established. In this work, we present FightLadder, a real-time fighting game platform, to empower competitive MARL research. Along with the platform, we provide implementations of state-of-the-art MARL algorithms for competitive games, as well as a set of evaluation metrics to characterize the performance and exploitability of agents. We demonstrate the feasibility of this platform by training a general agent that consistently defeats 12 built-in characters in single-player mode, and expose the difficulty of training a non-exploitable agent without human knowledge and demonstrations in two-player mode. FightLadder provides meticulously designed environments to address critical challenges in competitive MARL research, aiming to catalyze a new era of discovery and advancement in the field. Videos and code at https://sites.google.com/view/fightladder/home.

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389PythonJul 1, 20242 years agoMIT

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Cite this paper

@article{li2026fightladder,
  title  = {FightLadder: A Benchmark for Competitive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Wenzhe Li and Zihan Ding and Seth Karten and Chi Jin},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2406.02081},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02081},
  journal = {ICML 2024 2024}
}

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