Mahjax: A GPU-Accelerated Mahjong Simulator for Reinforcement Learning in JAX
Quick Answer
Mahjax is a GPU-accelerated Riichi Mahjong simulator developed in JAX, achieving up to 2 million steps per second on NVIDIA A100 GPUs.
Quick Take
It enables reinforcement learning from scratch, demonstrating effective agent training against baseline policies, thus enhancing decision-making research in complex environments.
Key Points
- Achieves 2 million steps per second on eight NVIDIA A100 GPUs.
- Fully vectorized environment allows large-scale rollout parallelization.
- High-quality visualization tool aids in debugging and agent interaction.
- Demonstrates effective training of agents to improve their ranks.
- Facilitates research in reinforcement learning for complex decision-making.
Paper Resources
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readAbstract:Riichi Mahjong is a multi-player, imperfect-information game characterized by stochasticity and high-dimensional state spaces. These attributes present a unique combination of challenges that mirror complex real-world decision-making problems in reinforcement learning. While prior research has heavily relied on supervised learning from human play logs to pre-train the policy, algorithms capable of learning \textit{tabula rasa} (from scratch) offer greater potential for general applicability, as evidenced by the AlphaZero lineage. To facilitate such research, we introduce \textbf{Mahjax}, a fully vectorized Riichi Mahjong environment implemented in JAX to enable large-scale rollout parallelization on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We also provide a high-quality visualization tool to streamline debugging and interaction with trained agents. Experimental results demonstrate that Mahjax achieves throughputs of up to \textbf{2 million} and \textbf{1 million steps per second} on eight NVIDIA A100 GPUs under the no-red and red rules, respectively. Furthermore, we validate the environment's utility for reinforcement learning by showing that agents can be trained effectively to improve their rank against baseline policies.
| Subjects: | Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.20577 [cs.AI] |
| (or arXiv:2605.20577v1 [cs.AI] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.20577 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Soichiro Nishimori [view email]
[v1]
Wed, 20 May 2026 00:33:28 UTC (217 KB)
— Originally published at arxiv.org
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