My background includes the fields of software engineering, game development, and game AI. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Southern California in May 2025, where my focus was about developing techniques for quality assurance of video games. In my research, I leverage a combination of program analysis and artificial intelligence approaches. My work is grounded in current game development practices and game engines, and evaluated via large-scale experiments across many existing games.

Select Publications

1. Automatic Action Space Specification for Deep Reinforcement Learning in Games via Program Analysis. Sasha Volokh and William G.J. Halfond. In Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2025). August 2025. [preprint] [DOI]

2. Automatically Defining Game Action Spaces for Exploration Using Program Analysis. Sasha Volokh and William G.J. Halfond. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-23). October 2023. Best Student Paper Award. [DOI]

3. Static Analysis for Automated Identification of Valid Game Actions During Exploration. Sasha Volokh and William G.J. Halfond. In 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG). September 2022. Best Paper Award. [DOI]