Learning Tennis Strategy Through Curriculum-Based Dueling Double Deep Q-Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning framework using curriculum-based dueling double deep Q-networks to optimize tennis strategies, achieving high win rates and demonstrating the importance of curriculum and architecture choices.

Contribution

It presents a novel tennis simulation environment combined with a curriculum learning approach and a dueling DDQN architecture for effective strategy learning.

Findings

Achieved 98-100% win rates against balanced opponents.

Demonstrated the necessity of curriculum learning and dueling architecture for stability.

Identified a defensive bias in learned strategies, emphasizing error avoidance.

Abstract

Tennis strategy optimization is a challenging sequential decision-making problem involving hierarchical scoring, stochastic outcomes, long-horizon credit assignment, physical fatigue, and adaptation to opponent skill. I present a reinforcement learning framework that integrates a custom tennis simulation environment with a Dueling Double Deep Q-Network(DDQN) trained using curriculum learning. The environment models complete tennis scoring at the level of points, games, and sets, rally-level tactical decisions across ten discrete action categories, symmetric fatigue dynamics, and a continuous opponent skill parameter. The dueling architecture decomposes action-value estimation into state-value and advantage components, while double Q-learning reduces overestimation bias and improves training stability in this long-horizon stochastic domain. Curriculum learning progressively increases opponent difficulty from 0.40 to 0.50, enabling robust skill acquisition without the training collapse observed under fixed opponents. Across extensive evaluations, the trained agent achieves win rates between 98 and 100 percent against balanced opponents and maintains strong performance against more challenging opponents. Serve efficiency ranges from 63.0 to 67.5 percent, and return efficiency ranges from 52.8 to 57.1 percent. Ablation studies demonstrate that both the dueling architecture and curriculum learning are necessary for stable convergence, while a standard DQN baseline fails to learn effective policies. Despite strong performance, tactical analysis reveals a pronounced defensive bias, with the learned policy prioritizing error avoidance and prolonged rallies over aggressive point construction. These results highlight a limitation of win-rate driven optimization in simplified sports simulations and emphasize the importance of reward design for realistic sports reinforcement learning.