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Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 18, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.
Epic provides a plugin for Unreal Engine 5 that lets game developers train AI-controlled characters and agents by having them learn through trial and error — similar to how a person gets better at a task by practicing. The tool, called Learning Agents, launched as an experimental feature with Unreal Engine 5.3 in September 2023 and is aimed at developers, not players.
Details
Learning Agents supports two training approaches. Reinforcement learning rewards the AI agent for making good decisions — such as navigating a course correctly — and penalizes it for mistakes, allowing the agent to gradually improve. Imitation learning records a human player performing a task and trains the AI to mimic those behaviors. Training is done via Python-based scripts within the plugin. Use cases include NPC behaviors, physics-based character animation, and game-playing agents. The tool has been featured in Hugging Face's deep reinforcement learning course, indicating some adoption in the broader AI development community. As of 2025, Learning Agents remains marked as Experimental in the engine and has not been widely adopted in shipped commercial games.
Products affected
Unreal Engine 5.3+
Sources & Evidence
Other practices by Epic Games
OtherAfter widespread protests from artists in December 2022, Epic's portfolio platform ArtStation introduced a "NoAI" label that artists can apply to their work to signal they do not want it used in AI training datasets. Epic also updated its terms of service to commit that it will not use or license any ArtStation content — labeled or not — for AI training purposes.OtherUnreal Engine 5 supports NVIDIA's DLSS technology, which uses AI to make games run more smoothly on compatible graphics cards by generating additional frames and sharpening images — without the full processing cost of rendering everything natively. Epic has also integrated NVIDIA's ACE tools, which give developers AI-powered options for animating digital human faces and generating NPC speech.OtherFortnite uses an algorithm to match players of similar skill levels against each other rather than grouping players randomly. To fill out lower-skill matches, the game also adds AI-controlled bot players that are designed to behave like real players. Both systems have been active since 2019 and remain among the game's most debated features.
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