Dark Souls bosses are an extremely challenging RL benchmark—current deep RL methods achieve near-zero performance, suggesting the domain requires advances in long-horizon reasoning, sparse rewards, and real-time decision-making under pressure.
DSLE is a benchmark platform that turns Dark Souls boss fights into reinforcement learning environments. It provides 22 real-time combat scenarios with visual input and sparse rewards, plus a curated 5-boss subset for standardized evaluation. Current RL methods (PPO, DQN) fail dramatically, while even hand-crafted solutions barely beat the tutorial boss.