Team and supervision

Team

My supervision activities cover PhD students, research engineers, interns, and master students, with research topics centered on general game playing, AI, machine learning, and computational game studies.

About GAIHA

GAIHA stands for General AI Human-like Agents. It is the research direction structuring part of my current work at UCLouvain, with a focus on artificial intelligence systems that are both general across tasks and, when relevant, human-like in their behaviour and reasoning.

In this perspective, games play a central role as rich and controlled environments for studying learning, planning, uncertainty, explainability, and decision-making across diverse settings.

The group is always open to new applications and discussions for internships, master's theses, PhD projects, and broader collaborations related to GAIHA.

PhD students

  1. Achille Morenville — Research topic: General Game Playing and Imperfect Information

Research engineers

  1. Foued Benidir — Laundry as a Service (LAAS) — start April 2026 — co-supervised with Sébastien Jodogne

Interns

  1. Loris Sogliuzzo — Preserving Human Chess Styles with Machine Learning — 2026 (5 months)
  2. Aloïs Rautureau — Cognitively Plausible Decision-Making in Game-Playing Agents: Models and Evaluation — 2026 (5 months)
  3. Aloïs Rautureau — Winning is not everything: Human-like agents for tabletop games — 2025 (3 months)

Administrative and financial support

  1. Aloïs Rautureau — GameTable COST Action Grant Manager — 2026–2027
  2. Anne-Christine Baudouin — GameTable COST Action Grant Manager — 2023–2025

Master students — in progress

  1. Boreux Pierre-Jean — Rehab Robotics - Human-in-the-Loop Optimization of Assistive Controllers via Offline Reinforcement Learning
  2. Neburac Maxime — Efficiently Updatable Neural Networks for Game Playing: Extending NNUE Beyond Chess and Shogi
  3. Butenda Babapu Timothée — Generation of a Medical Literature Database with Large Language Models
  4. Miclauri Mariam — Test-Driven Game Development: Further Refinement and Application
  5. Röben Friedrich — Solving the Mystery of Pente Grammai: AI Experiments on an Ancient Roman Board Game
  6. Peten Aymeric — Code Quality Evaluation for the General Game System Ludii
  7. Florent Noiset & Arnaud Bellière — Prototyping the Export of a Ludii Board Game into a VR Environment with Unreal Engine
  8. Mathis Delsart — Reinforcement Learning for Competitive MicroRTS Agents — co-supervised with Achille Morenville
  9. Raphaël Vassart — Rehab Robotics: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning for intuitive physical interactions with robotic devices — co-supervised with Renaud Ronsse
  10. Jérôme Lechat — Improving General Game AI for Modern Board Games
  11. Gauwain Savary-Kerneïs — Game-Specific vs. Generalized MCTS Approaches: A Study Using Ludii’s Game Library
  12. Andrei Florin Bourceanu — Exploring Tricolor: Computational Modeling and AI-Based Analysis of an Early Hex Tiling Game — co-supervised with Lisa Rougetet
  13. Clément Van Hauwaert — Game Recognition Through Images: A Machine Learning Approach for Game Ranking — co-supervised with Walter Crist

Master students — completed

  1. Alexandre De Salle
    Ludii Porting to Android
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. PDF
  2. Sébastien Vercammen
    Graphical Game Design Interface: Game Board and Setup
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. PDF
  3. Chiara Emanuela Zarrella
    Test-Driven Game Development
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. Co-supervised with Kim Mens. PDF
  4. Cyril Lapierre
    Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models: Synergies and Opportunities
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. Co-supervised with Lorenzo Frigerio. PDF
  5. Clémentine Sacré
    Scalable Board Expansion within a General Game System
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. PDF
  6. Alexandre Serrao
    Performance Evaluation of Counterfactual Regret Minimization and Monte Carlo Tree Search Variants: A Case Study on Belote
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. Co-supervised with Achille Morenville. PDF
  7. Alexandre Verlaine
    Introducing Card Games in Ludii
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. Co-supervised with Achille Morenville. PDF
  8. Cédric Antoine
    3D Ludii Games: The Case of the Shibumi Set
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. PDF
  9. Tom Dumont
    General Game Playing and Constraint Programming to Model, Play, and Solve any Logic Puzzles
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. PDF
  10. Pierre Accou
    Model and Play Logic Puzzles within Ludii
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2024. PDF
  11. Ismail Gunduz, Meike Thijsen, Elliot Doe, Aaron Schapira, and Simona Vychytilova
    General Game Playing with a Portfolio Agent using Machine Learning and GGP add-ons
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2022. PDF
  12. Alexandre Loncke
    Bandit Algorithms for General Game Playing
  13. Alexandre Loncke
    Constraint Programming Detection of Game Properties
  14. Xavier Heughe and Nicolas Salamé
    GVGP: A New Generic Challenge for Game AI