Value of Information-based Deceptive Path Planning Under Adversarial Interventions
This addresses the problem of designing deceptive paths against active adversaries for applications like security or robotics, representing an incremental advance over passive observer methods.
The paper tackles deceptive path planning under adversarial interventions by proposing a novel MDP-based model with value of information objectives, resulting in superior performance over existing methods on gridworld problems.
Existing methods for deceptive path planning (DPP) address the problem of designing paths that conceal their true goal from a passive, external observer. Such methods do not apply to problems where the observer has the ability to perform adversarial interventions to impede the path planning agent. In this paper, we propose a novel Markov decision process (MDP)-based model for the DPP problem under adversarial interventions and develop new value of information (VoI) objectives to guide the design of DPP policies. Using the VoI objectives we propose, path planning agents deceive the adversarial observer into choosing suboptimal interventions by selecting trajectories that are of low informational value to the observer. Leveraging connections to the linear programming theory for MDPs, we derive computationally efficient solution methods for synthesizing policies for performing DPP under adversarial interventions. In our experiments, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution method in achieving deceptiveness under adversarial interventions and demonstrate the superior performance of our approach to both existing DPP methods and conservative path planning approaches on illustrative gridworld problems.