cs.LGOct 3, 2026

Separating Decision Time from Decision Quality in the Real-Time Gap of Distilled Deciders: Evidence from a Game and a Conveyor Simulator

Authors: Chihoon Shin, Junyeong Lee, Kihyeok Jeong, Wonok Kwon

Organizations: Myeongseongsimjae AX Institute, Yeongyang-gun, Gyeongsangbuk-do, Republic of Korea · Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea · Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

Abstract

Real-time agents are often evaluated with the world paused, or with decision time rounded to whole ticks (tick conversion). Tick conversion predicts almost no loss for a learned decider whose hit accuracy falls by 14.8 percentage points (pp) on the same games in asynchronous play. We instead split the decider's gap to a zero-latency teacher into time and quality components. In ViZDoom, we train a small decider by imitating a scripted teacher, run the game on wall-clock time, and add a control in which the teacher waits for a call to the decider's server before deciding. On a Windows host, three preregistered studies put the time component at 6.5-8.7 pp and the quality component at 6.3-8.6 pp. On a Linux host that skips 0.08-0.09% of ticks, the time component disappeared (-0.1 pp; paired 95% bootstrap interval [-0.4, 0.0]) while the quality component remained (5.6 pp [3.7, 7.5]). Retraining on teacher-labelled states from the decider's own play (DAgger) improved it on new games on both hosts (2.6 pp [0.4, 4.9] and 3.1 pp [1.1, 5.2]), a preregistered partial success. Imposing one delay schedule on every arm in live play left a quality component of 5.8 pp [4.0, 7.5] on 100 new games, and retraining cut the decider's disagreement with the teacher on its own states from 22.7% to 14.9%. In a conveyor simulator with a 400 ms deadline, delay past it erased the quality component. A latency-matched control whose delays match the decider's shows which remedy to try.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables48 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. The World Won't Wait: Evaluating and Teaching Agents Under a Live Clock

    Oct 14, 2026Ningxin Pan, Hanyu Li, Yeqing Shen +3LLM Agent Self-ImprovementLLM Decision-Making

  2. Finding the Time to Think: Learning Planning Budgets in Real-Time RL

    Jun 24, 2026Aneesh Muppidi, Firas Darwish, Dylan Cope +2Reinforcement LearningPolicy Learning

  3. Realtime-Bench: Can Frontier Models Solve Real-time Interactive Problems?

    Oct 15, 2026Jingyu Tang, Xu Yang, Zhehao Zhang +7Agent EvaluationAI Agent Benchmarks