Deception in Optimal Control

In this paper, we consider an adversarial scenario where one agent seeks to achieve an objective and its adversary seeks to learn the agent's intentions and prevent the agent from achieving its objective. The agent has an incentive to try to deceive the adversary about its intentions, while at the same time working to achieve its objective. The primary contribution of this paper is to introduce a mathematically rigorous framework for the notion of deception within the context of optimal control. The central notion introduced in the paper is that of a belief-induced reward: a reward dependent not only on the agent's state and action, but also adversary's beliefs. Design of an optimal deceptive strategy then becomes a question of optimal control design on the product of the agent's state space and the adversary's belief space. The proposed framework allows for deception to be defined in an arbitrary control system endowed with a reward function, as well as with additional specifications limiting the agent's control policy. In addition to defining deception, we discuss design of optimally deceptive strategies under uncertainties in agent's knowledge about the adversary's learning process. In the latter part of the paper, we focus on a setting where the agent's behavior is governed by a Markov decision process, and show that the design of optimally deceptive strategies under lack of knowledge about the adversary naturally reduces to previously discussed problems in control design on partially observable or uncertain Markov decision processes. Finally, we present two examples of deceptive strategies: a "cops and robbers" scenario and an example where an agent may use camouflage while moving. We show that optimally deceptive strategies in such examples follow the intuitive idea of how to deceive an adversary in the above settings

Optimizing a Model-Agnostic Measure of Graph Counterdeceptiveness via Reattachment

Recognition of an adversary's objective is a core problem in physical security and cyber defense. Prior work on target recognition focuses on developing optimal inference strategies given the adversary's operating environment. However, the success of such strategies significantly depends on features of the environment. We consider the problem of optimal counterdeceptive environment design: construction of an environment which promotes early recognition of an adversary's objective, given operational constraints. Interpreting counterdeception as a question of graph design with a bound on total edge length, we propose a measure of graph counterdeceptiveness and a novel heuristic algorithm for maximizing counterdeceptiveness based on iterative reattachment of trees. We benchmark the performance of this algorithm on synthetic networks as well as a graph inspired by a real-world high-security environment, verifying that the proposed algorithm is computationally feasible and yields meaningful network designs.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure

Identifying Single-Input Linear System Dynamics from Reachable Sets

This paper is concerned with identifying linear system dynamics without the knowledge of individual system trajectories, but from the knowledge of the system's reachable sets observed at different times. Motivated by a scenario where the reachable sets are known from partially transparent manufacturer specifications or observations of the collective behavior of adversarial agents, we aim to utilize such sets to determine the unknown system's dynamics. This paper has two contributions. Firstly, we show that the sequence of the system's reachable sets can be used to uniquely determine the system's dynamics for asymmetric input sets under some generic assumptions, regardless of the system's dimensions. We also prove the same property holds up to a sign change for two-dimensional systems where the input set is symmetric around zero. Secondly, we present an algorithm to determine these dynamics. We apply and verify the developed theory and algorithms on an unknown band-pass filter circuit solely provided the unknown system's reachable sets over a finite observation period.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, published at the 62nd Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2023