Conditional Generation of Creative Chess Puzzles with Diffusion Models

Abstract:While modern language models demonstrate impressive generative capabilities, they often struggle with constrained, counter-intuitive creative tasks. To address this limitation, we explore chess puzzle generation as a rigorous testbed for computational creativity and reasoning, a domain where altering a single piece can invalidate an entire solution. We propose a novel approach for conditional generation of creative chess puzzles using masked diffusion models. Unlike previous methods, our non-directional diffusion approach allows for conditioning on specific tactical themes and partial board positions. We introduce a novel auxiliary task of simultaneous best-move prediction, which improves solution uniqueness by 11.6% and theme-conditioning accuracy by 2.5%. To further optimize solution uniqueness and theme conditioning, we establish a reinforcement learning framework adapted from Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (DDPO). This RL training increases the yield of unique and theme-matching positions by 89.1%. Finally, we release the first open-weights models (Appendix B) for chess puzzle generation, offering a new pathway for controllable, creative generation.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.38577 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.38577v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.38577 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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