Synthetic-to-Real Transfer Learning for League of Legends Minimap Object Detection (Student Abstract)

Abstract

Esports is growing rapidly, yet the data available to researchers is limited due to the game company policies. Consequently, vision-based approaches utilizing game screens are gaining attention as a practical alternative. We focus on the League of Legends minimap and address the challenges of champion detection when extracting champion information from the minimap. The challenges in this domain include small objects, rapid movement, and frequent occlusions. We propose a transfer-learning-based object detection pipeline that combines synthetic data with a subset of replay data. Synthetic data enables the rapid generation of diverse scenarios and improves training scalability, while replay data reduces the data distribution gap. This approach achieves 0.588 mean average precision, improving over replay-only by 0.261 and synthetic-only by 0.312, with 6.4 ms latency. Furthermore, we constructed a dataset encompassing all champions, enabling comparative analysis of detection models and supporting reproducible benchmarking for various application studies. © 2026, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.