arXiv AI

Learning Rewards in Strategic Games

The paper investigates how to infer agents’ underlying incentives in strategic multi‑agent settings, where traditional inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) may fail to produce rewards that guide optimal play. It introduces the concept of strategic identifiability and shows that learning from a fixed pair of policies can be insufficient regardless of sample size. To address this, the authors propose an active IRL algorithm for two‑player repeated Stackelberg games, combining maximum‑likelihood estimation with experimental design to achieve finite‑sample guarantees on sub‑optimality, and validate the approach in an anti‑poaching scenario.

arXiv AI
Jun 30

Exploration and Online Transfer with Behavioral Foundation Models

arXiv:2606. 29980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot Transfer in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent that can generate optimal policies for any reward function, without additional learning at transfer time, while training only on reward-free trajectories.

By Louis Bagot (SyCoSMA), Mathieu Lefort (LIRIS, SyCoSMA, IRISA, MALT, UR), La\"etitia Matignon (SyCoSMA)
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Defensive Sufficiency in a Stackelberg Model of AI Security

The paper investigates how feedback from automated testing, human red teaming, and incident response can enhance AI system defenses by enabling effective repairs. It establishes conditions under which a finite attack surface is defended with probability one, derives completion-time bounds, and extends the analysis to dynamic attack surfaces and generalized repairs. A defender-led Stackelberg game is formulated to determine the least-cost allocation of proactive discovery and reactive repair, revealing equilibrium regimes where the defender may invest in none, one, or both capabilities, and demonstrates through numerical experiments that faster repair can shorten compromise duration without lowering compromise probability.

By Subhabrata Majumdar, Rajlakshmi Chavan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

Learning in Structured Stackelberg Games

arXiv:2504.09006v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We initiate the study of structured Stackelberg games, a novel form of strategic interaction between a leader and a follower where contextual...

By Maria-Florina Balcan, Kiriaki Fragkia, Keegan Harris
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 30

Provable Benefits of Regularization: Fast Rates for Adversarial Imitation Learning

The paper introduces Dually Regularized AIL, a model‑free algorithm for adversarial imitation learning that jointly applies KL policy regularization and a quadratic reward penalty based on expert and learner occupancies. It proves fast convergence rates, achieving a ×O(1/K+1/N) bound on the regularized imitation gap in finite‑horizon MDPs with general function approximation, and establishes the first algorithm to attain ×O(1/ε) sample complexity in both expert demonstrations and online interactions for this regularized objective.

By Hanbin Zhou, Shangzhe Li, Alexander Braverman, Weitong Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

When Do Intrinsic Rewards Lead to Exploration?

The paper investigates when intrinsic rewards effectively drive exploration in reinforcement learning. It introduces a formal criterion that evaluates policies based on the counterfactual information they acquire, comparing how well their histories can replace experience from alternative policies. Using a simple environment, the authors show that common intrinsic reward objectives—count-based, prediction-error, empowerment, and information-gain—can lead to Pareto-suboptimal exploration under this criterion, and they propose conditions and a new objective that better align with optimal exploration.

By Scott W. Viteri (Stanford University), Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez (Stanford University), Clark Barrett (Stanford University)