Abstract

This talk will cover two papers both of which I presented at EC 2024. The two halves of the talk will be essentially independent of each other.

The first half of the talk will be about steering no-regret learners to a desired equilibrium. A mediator observes no-regret learners playing an extensive-form game repeatedly across T rounds. The mediator attempts to steer players toward some desirable predetermined equilibrium by giving (nonnegative) payments to players. We call this the steering problem. The steering problem captures several problems of interest, among them equilibrium selection and information design (persuasion). If the mediator's budget is unbounded, steering is trivial because the mediator can simply pay the players to play desirable actions. We study two bounds on the mediator's payments: a total budget and a per-round budget.

The second half of the talk will be about the class of games known as hidden-role games, in which players are assigned privately to teams and are faced with the challenge of recognizing and cooperating with teammates. This model includes both popular recreational games such as the Mafia/Werewolf family and The Resistance (Avalon) and many real-world settings, such as distributed systems where nodes need to work together to accomplish a goal in the face of possible corruptions. There has been little to no formal mathematical grounding of such settings in the literature, and it was previously not even clear what the right solution concepts (notions of equilibria) should be.

Biography

I am a final-year PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Tuomas Sandholm. I am supported by the CMU Hans J. Berliner Graduate Fellowship in Artificial Intelligence. My current research interests lie in computational game theory, especially equilibrium computation in extensive-form games; subgame solving; no-regret learning in games; automated mechanism design; adversarial team games; and solution concepts involving correlation, communication, and/or mediation. I have also done work in adversarial robustness, fairness in machine learning, and quantum computing. Prior to CMU, I completed my undergraduate and master's degrees at Stanford University, where I worked with Prof. Greg Valiant.

• Admission

Zoom Meeting ID: 824 5030 5971

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