Stop the compartmentalization: unified robust algorithms for handling uncertainties in security games

Given the real-world applications of Stackelberg security games (SSGs), addressing uncertainties in these games is a major challenge. Unfortunately, we lack any unified computational framework for handling uncertainties in SSGs. Current state-of-the-art has provided only compartmentalized robust algorithms that handle uncertainty exclusively either in the defender’s strategy or in adversary’s payoff or in the adversary’s rationality, leading to potential failures in real-world scenarios where a defender often faces multiple types of uncertainties. Furthermore, insights for improving performance are not leveraged across the compartments, leading to significant losses in quality or efficiency. In this paper, we provide the following main contributions: 1) we present the first unified framework for handling the uncertainties explored in SSGs; 2) based on this unified framework, we propose the first set of “unified” robust algorithms to address combinations of these uncertainties; 3) we introduce approximate scalable robust algorithms for handling these uncertainties that leverage insights across compartments; 4) we present experiments demonstrating solution quality and runtime advantages of our algorithms.