Algorithmic Game Theory

Computing equilibria and learning strategies in multi-agent strategic settings.

Many real-world systems involve strategic interactions — defenders and attackers, planners and responders. We develop scalable methods for computing and learning equilibria in these settings.

Key directions:

  • End-to-end gradient descent for Stackelberg games
  • Deep fictitious play for continuous action spaces
  • Security games and green security patrol scheduling
  • Learning adversary models from data

Selected publications:

(Wang et al., 2022; Niu et al., 2025; Kamra et al., 2019; Cooney et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020)

References

2025

  1. Finding a Multiple Follower Stackelberg Equilibrium: A Fully First-Order Method
    April Niu, Kai Wang, and Juba Ziani
    2025
    In submission

2022

  1. Coordinating Followers to Reach Better Equilibria: End-to-End Gradient Descent for Stackelberg Games
    Kai Wang, Lily Xu, Andrew Perrault, Michael K. Reiter, and Milind Tambe
    In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2022

2020

  1. Scalable Game-Focused Learning of Adversary Models: Data-to-Decisions in Network Security Games
    Kai Wang, Andrew Perrault, Aditya Mate, and Milind Tambe
    In International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), 2020

2019

  1. DeepFP for Finding Approximate Nash Equilibrium in Continuous Action Spaces
    Nitin Kamra, Umang Gupta, Kai Wang, Fei Fang, Yan Liu, and 1 more author
    In Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security (GameSec), 2019
  2. Learning to Signal in the Goldilocks Zone: Improving Adversary Compliance in Security Games
    Sarah Cooney, Kai Wang, Elizabeth Bondi, Thanh Nguyen, Phebe Vayanos, and 5 more authors
    In European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD), 2019