No Arabic abstract
We study an information-structure design problem (a.k.a. persuasion) with a single sender and multiple receivers with actions of a priori unknown types, independently drawn from action-specific marginal distributions. As in the standard Bayesian persuasion model, the sender has access to additional information regarding the action types, which she can exploit when committing to a (noisy) signaling scheme through which she sends a private signal to each receiver. The novelty of our model is in considering the case where the receivers interact in a sequential game with imperfect information, with utilities depending on the game outcome and the realized action types. After formalizing the notions of ex ante and ex interim persuasiveness (which differ in the time at which the receivers commit to following the senders signaling scheme), we investigate the continuous optimization problem of computing a signaling scheme which maximizes the senders expected revenue. We show that computing an optimal ex ante persuasive signaling scheme is NP-hard when there are three or more receivers. In contrast with previous hardness results for ex interim persuasion, we show that, for games with two receivers, an optimal ex ante persuasive signaling scheme can be computed in polynomial time thanks to a novel algorithm based on the ellipsoid method which we propose.
In this paper, we present exploitability descent, a new algorithm to compute approximate equilibria in two-player zero-sum extensive-form games with imperfect information, by direct policy optimization against worst-case opponents. We prove that when following this optimization, the exploitability of a players strategy converges asymptotically to zero, and hence when both players employ this optimization, the joint policies converge to a Nash equilibrium. Unlike fictitious play (XFP) and counterfactual regret minimization (CFR), our convergence result pertains to the policies being optimized rather than the average policies. Our experiments demonstrate convergence rates comparable to XFP and CFR in four benchmark games in the tabular case. Using function approximation, we find that our algorithm outperforms the tabular version in two of the games, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first such result in imperfect information games among this class of algorithms.
Game tree search algorithms such as minimax have been used with enormous success in turn-based adversarial games such as Chess or Checkers. However, such algorithms cannot be directly applied to real-time strategy (RTS) games because a number of reasons. For example, minimax assumes a turn-taking game mechanics, not present in RTS games. In this paper we present RTMM, a real-time variant of the standard minimax algorithm, and discuss its applicability in the context of RTS games. We discuss its strengths and weaknesses, and evaluate it in two real-time games.
Security Games employ game theoretical tools to derive resource allocation strategies in security domains. Recent works considered the presence of alarm systems, even suffering various forms of uncertainty, and showed that disregarding alarm signals may lead to arbitrarily bad strategies. The central problem with an alarm system, unexplored in other Security Games, is finding the best strategy to respond to alarm signals for each mobile defensive resource. The literature provides results for the basic single-resource case, showing that even in that case the problem is computationally hard. In this paper, we focus on the challenging problem of designing algorithms scaling with multiple resources. First, we focus on finding the minimum number of resources assuring non-null protection to every target. Then, we deal with the computation of multi-resource strategies with different degrees of coordination among resources. For each considered problem, we provide a computational analysis and propose algorithmic methods.
We focus on adversarial patrolling games on arbitrary graphs, where the Defender can control a mobile resource, the targets are alarmed by an alarm system, and the Attacker can observe the actions of the mobile resource of the Defender and perform different attacks exploiting multiple resources. This scenario can be modeled as a zero-sum extensive-form game in which each player can play multiple times. The game tree is exponentially large both in the size of the graph and in the number of attacking resources. We show that when the number of the Attackers resources is free, the problem of computing the equilibrium path is NP-hard, while when the number of resources is fixed, the equilibrium path can be computed in poly-time. We provide a dynamic-programming algorithm that, given the number of the Attackers resources, computes the equilibrium path requiring poly-time in the size of the graph and exponential time in the number of the resources. Furthermore, since in real-world scenarios it is implausible that the Defender knows the number of attacking resources, we study the robustness of the Defenders strategy when she makes a wrong guess about that number. We show that even the error of just a single resource can lead to an arbitrary inefficiency, when the inefficiency is defined as the ratio of the Defenders utilities obtained with a wrong guess and a correct guess. However, a more suitable definition of inefficiency is given by the difference of the Defenders utilities: this way, we observe that the higher the error in the estimation, the higher the loss for the Defender. Then, we investigate the performance of online algorithms when no information about the Attackers resources is available. Finally, we resort to randomized online algorithms showing that we can obtain a competitive factor that is twice better than the one that can be achieved by any deterministic online algorithm.
We provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first computational study of extensive-form adversarial team games. These games are sequential, zero-sum games in which a team of players, sharing the same utility function, faces an adversary. We define three different scenarios according to the communication capabilities of the team. In the first, the teammates can communicate and correlate their actions both before and during the play. In the second, they can only communicate before the play. In the third, no communication is possible at all. We define the most suitable solution concepts, and we study the inefficiency caused by partial or null communication, showing that the inefficiency can be arbitrarily large in the size of the game tree. Furthermore, we study the computational complexity of the equilibrium-finding problem in the three scenarios mentioned above, and we provide, for each of the three scenarios, an exact algorithm. Finally, we empirically evaluate the scalability of the algorithms in random games and the inefficiency caused by partial or null communication.