Papers for
security simulation teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Diffnash finds better strategies in high-dimensional continuous games
DiffNash: Finding Nash Equilibrium in High-Dimensional Continuous Action Spaces with Diffusion Policies
Abstract: Computing equilibria in high-dimensional continuous games requires learning and representing rich, multi-modal strategy distributions, something conventional neural policies struggle to achieve. Diffusion models offer a natural solution, but standard diffusion training requires direct samples from a fixed target distribution, which are generally unavailable under iterative game-solving updates. We propose a diffusion-based framework for equilibrium computation that enables diffusion-based variants of Online Mirror Descent (OMD) and Fictitious Play (FP). Our approach derives a reweighted score-matching objective that trains diffusion policies without requiring direct samples from each updated policy. Our main method, DiffNash, combines the fast convergence of OMD with the sample efficiency of FP by reusing past actions through a replay buffer. To correct the resulting distribution shift from sample reuse, we derive an unbiased estimator of the difference between current and past policies' Evidence Lower Bounds, whose exponential provides a tractable proxy for the corresponding importance weight without evaluating diffusion likelihoods. We evaluate our approach on forest protection games and continuous Colonel Blotto games, reducing the Nash gap over the strongest baseline by 35.6% and 24.7%, respectively, with minimal hyperparameter tuning.
Orchestrating reasoned policies improves play against unknown opponents in dynamic games
Orchestrating Level-$K$ Policies Against Unknown Opponents in Partially-Observable Dynamic Games
Abstract: Level-$K$ reasoning generates a hierarchy of policies specialized to opponents with different reasoning levels. When an opponent's level is unknown, a common deployment rule estimates that level and selects the corresponding response. In a dynamic, partially-observed game, this selection is repeated, with each choice shaping subsequent states and observations. The response associated with the most likely opponent level need not maximize expected return from the current history. We formulate this deployment problem as dynamic orchestration of a fixed, pretrained policy library in a partially observable Markov game. We compare classification-based orchestrators (CBOs) trained using offline data or on-policy data aggregation with a reinforcement-learning-based orchestrator (RLBO) trained to maximize expected discounted return. In pursuit-evasion experiments, on-policy training improves classification and return, yet RLBO achieves higher return than the on-policy and offline CBOs. Given a pretrained library, RLBO also reaches performance comparable to a policy trained directly over the pursuers' action space with fewer training timesteps. These findings support treating a hierarchy of level-$K$ policies as a resource for orchestration, not a prescription for deployment.