Speed vs Accuracy in Goal Recognition for Time-Sensitive Applications: a Game-Theoretic Approach

Abstract

This work addresses a specific case of Goal Recognition (GR), wherea malicious actor (the attacker) seeks to reach and damage one ofseveral sensitive targets, while the observer (the defender) mustidentify the attacker’s target and allocate limited resources to pro-tect it. Focusing on real-world physical and cyber security scenarios,the defender faces a trade-off between acting early, with limited in-formation, or waiting for more data but risking insufficient time todefend. Our contributions include introducing a game-theoretic for-mulation of this instance of GR, which captures the time-sensitivenature of these scenarios, and providing an efficient method tocompute Nash equilibria using the fictitious play learning scheme.Experimental results confirm that our method equips the defen