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Beyond Search-Imitation: Prior-Directed Exploration for Searchless Chess

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 27, 2026 · UTC

Searchless chess networks reach human master strength from a single forward pass by imitating a stronger teacher: the strongest, Leela Chess Zero's (Lc0) released Chessformer, distills the visit counts of an AlphaZero-style Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Imitating a search is a poor proxy for playing without one, so we fine-tune for single-pass strength with self-play reinforcement learning (RL). Its exploration is usually supplied by an entropy bonus, the reverse Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to uniform. We replace it with a forward, mass-covering KL toward the network's own MCTS prior (p

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