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Neuroevolution combined with search-based software testing principles has been shown to be a promising approach for testing games, but the co-evolutionary search for optimal network topologies and weights involves unreasonably long search durations. Humans, on the other hand, tend to be quick in picking up basic gameplay. In this article, we therefore aim to improve the evolutionary search for game input generators by integrating knowledge about human gameplay behaviour. To this end, we propose a novel way of systematically recording human gameplay traces, and integrating these traces into the evolutionary search for networks using traditional gradient descent as a mutation operator. Experiments conducted on 10 diverse\n                    <jats:sc>Scratch<\/jats:sc>\n                    games demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the average search time from 5 hours down to only 97\u2009minutes and helps the test generator achieve higher program coverage by reaching the winning states of games more often.\n                  <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3747189","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,4]],"date-time":"2025-07-04T09:12:36Z","timestamp":1751620356000},"page":"1-32","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Learning by Viewing: Generating Test Inputs for Games by Integrating Human Gameplay Traces in Neuroevolution"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"6","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9509-7671","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Patric","family":"Feldmeier","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Passau, Passau, Germany"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4364-6595","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Gordon","family":"Fraser","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Passau, Passau, Germany"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,3]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_2_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1080\/08993400500150747"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3293455"},{"key":"e_1_3_2_4_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"185","DOI":"10.1109\/ICST.2010.54","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST\u201910)","author":"Baresi Luciano","year":"2010","unstructured":"Luciano Baresi, Pier Luca Lanzi, and Matteo Miraz. 2010. 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