---
license: agpl-3.0
tags:
  - chess
  - behavioral-cloning
  - human-ai-alignment
---

# Temporal Conditioning for Human Behavioral Cloning in Chess

Weights and evaluation data for the IEEE GEM 2026 paper.

Code and reproduction instructions:
https://github.com/Prof-it/temporal-chess-model

## Models

Five checkpoints, each released as `.onnx` (to play) and `.pt` (to evaluate).

| Model | Steps | |
|---|---|---|
| `marvin_23m_cond_1700k` | 1.70M | 23M time-conditioned, longest-trained and strongest |
| `marvin_79m_cond_1650k` | 1.65M | 79M time-conditioned, the model the paper compares to Maia-3 |
| `marvin_23m_cond_1M` | 1.00M | 23M time-conditioned, ablation arm |
| `marvin_23m_blind_1M` | 1.00M | 23M time-blind twin, ablation baseline |
| `marvin_79m_cond_1M` | 1.00M | 79M time-conditioned, step-matched to the 23M pair |

The three `1M` checkpoints are step-matched, so those are the ones to compare
against each other. Training of the time-blind arm stopped at 1M steps, which is
why it has no later checkpoint.

`checkpoints_MANIFEST.json` records the role, sha256, step count, seeds,
parameter count and training command for each.

## Evaluation data

`eval-data/testset_2026-05/` is the held-out test set every reported number is
computed on: 1,500,029 positions from May 2026 Lichess games, one position per
game, rated 1200-2500, across all time controls.

## Use

```bash
git clone https://github.com/Prof-it/temporal-chess-model
cd temporal-chess-model
pip install -r requirements-engine.txt
python download_assets.py --engine
scripts/marvin-uci.sh          # or point a chess GUI at it
```

Every `.pt` embeds its own `config_dict`, so `evaluation.backends.make_backend`
loads any of them without being told the architecture.

## Citation

```bibtex
@inproceedings{dziwniel2026temporal,
  author    = {Victor Dziwniel and Tianxiang Lu},
  title     = {Temporal Conditioning for Human Behavioral Cloning in Chess},
  booktitle = {2026 IEEE Gaming, Entertainment and Media Conference (GEM)},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {IEEE}
}
```