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 — co-supervised with Renaud Ronsse
  2. Neburac Maxime — Efficiently Updatable Neural Networks for Game Playing: Extending NNUE Beyond Chess and Shogi — co-supervised with Aloïs Rautureau
  3. Butenda Babapu Timothée — Generation of a Medical Literature Database with Large Language Models — co-supervised with Benoît Ronval and Cédric Van Marcke de Lummen
  4. Miclauri Mariam — Test-Driven Game Development: Further Refinement and Application — co-supervised with Kim Mens
  5. Röben Friedrich — Solving the Mystery of Pente Grammai: AI Experiments on an Ancient Roman Board Game — co-supervised with Tim Penn and Walter Crist
  6. Peten Aymeric — Code Quality Evaluation for the General Game System Ludii — co-supervised with Kim Mens
  7. Clément Van Hauwaert — Game Recognition Through Images: A Machine Learning Approach for Game Ranking — co-supervised with Walter Crist
  8. Noé Libon — Detecting Patterns in Ludii — co-supervised with Kim Mens

Master students — completed

  1. Raphaël Vassart
    Offline Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Tuning of a Powered Ankle-Foot Prosthesis
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. Co-supervised with Renaud Ronsse. PDF
  2. Mathis Delsart
    Deep Reinforcement Learning for Competitive Agents in MicroRTS - Architecture, Training, and Tournament Evaluation
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. Co-supervised with Achille Morenville. PDF
  3. Gauwain Savary-Kerneïs
    Game-Specific vs. Generalized MCTS Approaches: A Study Using Ludii’s Game Library
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. PDF
  4. Florent Noiset & Arnaud Bellière
    Transforming Ancient Board Games into Interactive VR Cultural Heritage Experiences
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. PDF
  5. Jérôme Lechat
    Improving Imperfect-Information Reasoning in Ludii through Constraint-Based Hypothesis Generation
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. PDF
  6. Andrei Florin Bourceanu
    Tricolor - Computational Analysis and AI Exploration of an Early Hexagonal Board Game
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. Co-supervised with Lisa Rougetet. PDF
  7. Alexandre De Salle
    Ludii Porting to Android
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. PDF
  8. Sébastien Vercammen
    Graphical Game Design Interface: Game Board and Setup
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2026. PDF
  9. Chiara Emanuela Zarrella
    Test-Driven Game Development
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. Co-supervised with Kim Mens. PDF
  10. Cyril Lapierre
    Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models: Synergies and Opportunities
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. Co-supervised with Lorenzo Frigerio. PDF
  11. Clémentine Sacré
    Scalable Board Expansion within a General Game System
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. PDF
  12. 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
  13. Alexandre Verlaine
    Introducing Card Games in Ludii
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. Co-supervised with Achille Morenville. PDF
  14. Cédric Antoine
    3D Ludii Games: The Case of the Shibumi Set
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. PDF
  15. Tom Dumont
    General Game Playing and Constraint Programming to Model, Play, and Solve any Logic Puzzles
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2025. PDF
  16. Pierre Accou
    Model and Play Logic Puzzles within Ludii
    Master's thesis, UCLouvain, 2024. PDF
  17. 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
  18. Alexandre Loncke
    Bandit Algorithms for General Game Playing
  19. Alexandre Loncke
    Constraint Programming Detection of Game Properties
  20. Xavier Heughe and Nicolas Salamé
    GVGP: A New Generic Challenge for Game AI