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Virginia Tech

GlitchAgent: Detecting Video Game Glitches from Gameplay Videos

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

The increasing complexity of modern video games has made Quality Assurance (QA) a critical yet challenging bottleneck in the video game development and maintenance lifecycle, which relies heavily on expensive, labor-intensive, and inefficient manual testing. Automated glitch detection from gameplay videos offers a promising alternative, but is hampered by a profound scarcity of annotated datasets, the ambiguity of identifying glitches without temporal context, and the need for precise temporal localization of anomalies. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to address these challenges. First, we introduce a new video-based benchmark dataset VideoGlitch for video game glitch detection, featuring diverse gameplay videos. The videos are annotated with detailed, natural-language glitch descriptions and precise temporal timestamps, created through a semi-automated pipeline leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and human validation. Second, we propose GlitchAgent, a multi-stage framework for open-ended glitch detection with precise timestamps. GlitchAgent operates by different video preprocessing procedure, then generating glitch hypotheses with the Local Glitch Detector, tracing the full duration of anomalies via a novel temporal propagation mechanism, and synthesizing a single, temporal description for each unique glitch with corresponding timestamps. To evaluate our system, we introduce the LLM-as-the-judge Glitch Detection Score (GDS), a novel metric that uses an LLM for semantic scoring and couples it with temporal Intersection over Union (IoU) for a more robust assessment than traditional metrics. Experiments demonstrate that GlitchAgent significantly enhances the performance of various MLLM backbones, substantially improving detection precision and temporal grounding accuracy compared to baseline approaches.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Science
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science & Applications
Department dc:contributor.department
Computer Science and#38; Applications
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2025

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Zhou, Tong
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Huang, Lifu
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Thomas, Christopher Lee
  • Wang, Xuan

Subjects

dc:subject × 3

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright
Language dc:language.iso
en

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:44636
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/137791

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Zhou, Tong. GlitchAgent: Detecting Video Game Glitches from Gameplay Videos. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2025. https://hdl.handle.net/10919/137791