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March 9-13, 2026
Moscone CenterSan Francisco, CA

Agenda

Orchestrating Speed with AI: Using llm-d, vLLM, and RL for Speedrun Planning (Presented by Red Hat)

Christopher Nuland  (Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat)
Location: Future Tech Stage, South Hall
Date: Wednesday, March 11
Time: 11:10 am - 11:30 am
Pass Type: Festival Pass, Game Changer Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Game & Production Technology
Format: Power Talk
Vault Recording: Not Recorded
Red Hat

This session shows how we turn a suboptimal reinforcement learning exploration agent into a route seeking speedrunner by pairing PPO with a panel of model judges orchestrated by llm-d and served with vLLM. The agent plays normally while a narrow planner handles dialog and puzzle moments, then llm-d routes short clips to a vision judge, a state checker, and a rule judge to produce preferences that train a small reward model. The next PPO burst learns with shaped rewards, improving coverage, reliable dialog completion, and key speedrun metrics. We keep it practical for game developers with YAML first deployment on OpenShift AI using KServe and vLLM, plus a reusable kit of prompts, rubrics, and metrics. We will showcase Double Dragon and Zelda: Oracle of Seasons on the original Nintendo Gameboy, but the same pattern applies to any game for automated testing or optimal route discovery for speed running.