i-Game being a co-organizer of the Video4IMX Workshop – sponsored by the TRANSMIXR project – was staged at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (IMX), the leading international conference for presentation and discussion of research into interactive media experiences. This year, IMX 2025 was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from June 3 to 6, 2025 under the theme “Riding the Waves of Innovation and Diversity in Interactive Media”.
Dr. Stefanos Vrochidis, Senior Researcher at CERTH-ITI (Project Co-ordinator), delivered a presentation of a paper entitled “Distilling Gaming Strategy through Explainability in Tetris” during ISIM & Video4IMX Workshop – Session 3. The paper is introducing a novel framework that leverages explanation-based knowledge distillation to modulate agents’ internal reasoning, yielding both convergent and divergent behavioral strategies. To demonstrate this approach, our researchers conducted experiments in a Tetris environment comparing baseline agents trained with standard reinforcement learning to agents whose training was modified by incorporating explainability losses. Our dynamic framework integrates a feedback mechanism that adjusts the influence of the explainability term based on performance and strategic utility. This work demonstrates the potential of employing explainability not only as an interpretative tool but also as a means to actively diversify and refine strategies in complex, dynamic environments.
The workshop was focused on supporting the growth of a community of researchers and practitioners interested in creating an ecosystem of tools, specifications and best practices for video discovery, adaptation, summarization or generation, particularly in the context of video (re-)use in immersive experiences.