Dynamic Hypergames for Synthesis of Deceptive Strategies With Temporal Logic Objectives

In this paper, we study the use of deception for strategic planning in adversarial environments. We model the interaction between the agent (player 1) and the adversary (player 2) as a two-player concurrent stochastic game in which the adversary has incomplete information about the agent’s task specification given as a temporal logic formula. During the interaction, the adversary can infer the agent’s intention from observations and adapt its strategy so as to prevent the agent from satisfying the objective. To plan against such an adaptive opponent, the agent must leverage its knowledge about the adversary’s incomplete information to influence the behavior of the opponent, and thereby be deceptive. To synthesize a deceptive strategy, we introduce a class of hypergame models that capture the interaction between the agent and its adversary given asymmetric, incomplete information. We develop a solution concept for this class of hypergames and show that the subjectively rationalizable strategy for the agent is deceptive and maximizes the probability of satisfying the task in temporal logic. Such a deceptive strategy is obtained by modeling the opponent’s evolving perception of the agent’s objective and integrating it into planning. This allows the agent to manipulate the opponent’s perception so as to induce the opponent into taking actions that benefit the agent. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our deceptive planning algorithm using robot motion planning examples with temporal logic objectives and design a detection mechanism to notify the agent of potential errors in modeling the adversary’s behavior. Note to Practitioners—Many security and defense applications employ deception mechanisms for strategic advantages. This work presents a game-theoretic framework for planning deceptive strategies in stochastic environments and shows that the opponent modeling plays a key role in the design of effective deception mechanisms. For applications to cyber-physical security, the practitioners can employ temporal logic for specifying security properties in the system and analyze defense with deception using the proposed methods.