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.

Sun 11 OctMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputer Science and Game Theory
The gist
Finding the best strategies for games where players can choose from many complex options is hard, especially when traditional methods struggle to represent all possible moves. The authors created DiffNash, which uses a special kind of AI model called diffusion policies to handle complex and changing strategy choices. This approach improves how quickly and accurately the best responses are learned by reusing past information cleverly. They tested DiffNash on multiplayer strategic games and showed it finds stronger strategies than previous methods with less tuning.
Open → 2610.15932v1

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.

Sun 4 OctMultiagent SystemsRobotics
The gist
When playing games where you don't know how smart your opponent is or what they will do, it helps to have a set of plans tailored to different opponent types. The authors show that instead of just guessing your opponent's type and sticking with one plan, it's better to dynamically switch between plans to get the best results based on new information during the game. They test this idea in a chase game and find that training a system to pick the best plan through trial and error works better than classification methods alone. This suggests that having a library of opponent-aware plans is useful if managed smartly, not just used directly.
Open → 2610.04937v1