VGC-Bench: Towards Mastering Diverse Team Strategies in Competitive Pokémon

Abstract

Developing AI agents that can robustly adapt to varying strategic landscapes without retraining is a central challenge in multi-agent learning. Pokémon Video Game Championships (VGC) is a domain with a vast space of approximately $10^{139}$ team configurations, far larger than those of other games such as Chess, Go, Poker, StarCraft, or Dota. The combinatorial nature of team building in Pokémon VGC causes optimal strategies to vary substantially depending on both the controlled team and the opponent's team, making generalization uniquely challenging. To advance research on this problem, we introduce VGC-Bench: a benchmark that provides critical infrastructure, standardizes evaluation protocols, and supplies a human-play dataset of over 700,000 battle logs and a range of baseline agents based on heuristics, large language models, behavior cloning, and multi-agent reinforcement learning with empirical game-theoretic methods such as self-play, fictitious play, and double oracle. In the restricted setting where an agent is trained and evaluated in a mirror match with a single team configuration, our methods can win against a professional VGC competitor. We repeat this training and evaluation with progressively larger team sets and find that as the number of teams increases, the best-performing algorithm in the single-team setting has worse performance and is more exploitable, but has improved generalization to unseen teams. Our code and dataset are open-sourced at https://github.com/cameronangliss/vgc-bench and https://huggingface.co/datasets/cameronangliss/vgc-battle-logs.