Public Information Representation for Adversarial Team Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel game representation for adversarial team games that enables the use of standard game-solving tools by converting the team game into a two-player zero-sum game with a single coordinator, allowing for effective abstraction and size reduction.

Contribution

The authors propose a new game representation that transforms sequential team games into a more expressive two-player zero-sum form, facilitating the application of standard tools and abstraction techniques.

Findings

The new representation captures all state/action abstractions of the original game.

Three algorithms produce lossless abstractions significantly reducing game size.

Experimental results on Kuhn and Leduc Poker demonstrate effectiveness.

Abstract

The peculiarity of adversarial team games resides in the asymmetric information available to the team members during the play, which makes the equilibrium computation problem hard even with zero-sum payoffs. The algorithms available in the literature work with implicit representations of the strategy space and mainly resort to Linear Programming and column generation techniques to enlarge incrementally the strategy space. Such representations prevent the adoption of standard tools such as abstraction generation, game solving, and subgame solving, which demonstrated to be crucial when solving huge, real-world two-player zero-sum games. Differently from these works, we answer the question of whether there is any suitable game representation enabling the adoption of those tools. In particular, our algorithms convert a sequential team game with adversaries to a classical two-player zero-sum game. In this converted game, the team is transformed into a single coordinator player who only knows information common to the whole team and prescribes to the players an action for any possible private state. Interestingly, we show that our game is more expressive than the original extensive-form game as any state/action abstraction of the extensive-form game can be captured by our representation, while the reverse does not hold. Due to the NP-hard nature of the problem, the resulting Public Team game may be exponentially larger than the original one. To limit this explosion, we provide three algorithms, each returning an information-lossless abstraction that dramatically reduces the size of the tree. These abstractions can be produced without generating the original game tree. Finally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed approach by presenting experimental results on Kuhn and Leduc Poker games, obtained by applying state-of-art algorithms for two-player zero-sum games on the converted games