arXiv Machine Learning

Decision-Focused Learning in Network Interdiction Games

arXiv:2608. 09036v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study decision-focused learning (DFL) in shortest-path network interdiction (SPNI) games, a Stackelberg game where an interdictor (leader) strengthens the networks' arcs against attacks, while an evader (follower) who is uncertain about costs of attacking network arcs relies on a machine-learned predictor to identify the shortest path.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Robust Nash Alignment under Preference Uncertainty

Robust Nash Alignment introduces a game-theoretic framework that seeks a policy with a high worst-case win rate against both an adversarial competitor and any preference kernel within an ambiguity set around a nominal preference. The authors propose a four-player primal-dual proxy game and an optimistic mirror descent-ascent algorithm to efficiently optimize this robust objective, proving convergence guarantees and demonstrating improved performance in controlled tabular games and LLM alignment experiments.

By Shihab Ahmed, Debamita Ghosh, David Tang, Yudan Wang, Alvaro Velasquez, Yue Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 24

When Clients Are Orchestrated: Strategic Gradient Manipulation to Defeat Federated Learning Servers with Efficient Defense

The paper introduces Fed-ADR, a coordinated attack framework where a malicious orchestrator server directs heterogeneous adversarial clients to adapt their gradient updates in real time, thereby evading existing federated learning defenses and drastically reducing global model accuracy. It also presents a lightweight detection mechanism that estimates true client gradients from historical data to spot coordinated attacks, and an in-situ recovery method that restores model performance without restarting training. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion‑MNIST, and CIFAR‑10 show the attack can drop accuracy from over 90% to below 10%, while the defense can recover accuracy to above 90% within a few rounds at a computational cost at least 20× lower than retraining from scratch.

By Mohamed Shaaban, Ahmed Abdelnaby, Mohamed Elmahallawy
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