Beyond Homogeneous Adversaries: Stackelberg Security Games with Mixed Quantal Response
Beyond Homogeneous Adversaries: Stackelberg Security Games with Mixed Quantal Response
Hoang Giang Pham, Tien Mai, Thuy Anh Ta, Minh Hoàng Hà
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3523-3531.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/392
The quantal response (QR) model is widely used in Stackelberg security games (SSGs) to capture boundedly rational adversaries. Existing work on SSGs under QR, however, almost exclusively assumes a homogeneous attacker population, ignoring heterogeneity in attacker preferences and rationality. We study SSG with mixed quantal response attackers, where the follower population consists of multiple discrete attacker types, each following a type-specific QR model. The defender allocates limited resources across targets, while an attacker drawn from this heterogeneous population observes the defender’s strategy and attacks a single target. This results in a highly non-convex equilibrium computation problem. We develop a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for this setting when the number of attacker types is bounded, based on an exponential cone programming formulation combined with a carefully designed Branch-and-Bound procedure. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms standard gradient-based methods and that explicitly modeling attacker heterogeneity yields significant gains over traditional SSG models with a single QR attacker.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Noncooperative games
