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Representation Matters for Mastering Chess: Improved Feature Representation in AlphaZero Outperforms Switching to Transformers

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abstract

While transformers have gained recognition as a versatile tool for artificial intelligence (AI), an unexplored challenge arises in the context of chess - a classical AI benchmark. Here, incorporating Vision Transformers (ViTs) into AlphaZero is insufficient for chess mastery, mainly due to ViTs' computational limitations. The attempt to optimize their efficiency by combining MobileNet and NextViT outperformed AlphaZero by about 30 Elo. However, we propose a practical improvement that involves a simple change in the input representation and value loss functions. As a result, we achieve a significant performance boost of up to 180 Elo points beyond what is currently achievable with AlphaZero in chess. In addition to these improvements, our experimental results using the Integrated Gradient technique confirm the effectiveness of the newly introduced features.

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cs.AI 1

years

2025 1

verdicts

CONDITIONAL 1

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  • Understanding the learned look-ahead behavior of chess neural networks cs.AI · 2025-05-26 · conditional · none · ref 2024 · internal anchor

    The Leela Chess Zero policy network encodes information about destination squares of moves up to seven plies ahead, with attention heads that copy future-square information backward in time in a pattern-dependent way.