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         Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management

                             The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Date: 4:30pm - 5:30pm on 12 September (Friday)

Venue: ERB 513, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Title: Dynamic Information Manipulation Game

Speaker: Shutian Liu, Department of Systems Engineering, City University

of Hong Kong



Abstract:

We propose a dynamic information manipulation game (DIMG) to investigate

the incentives of an information manipulator (IM) to influence the

transition rules of a partially observable Markov decision process

(POMDP). DIMG is a hierarchical game where the upper-level IM stealthily

designs the POMDP’s joint state distributions to influence the

lower-level controller’s actions. DIMG’s fundamental feature is

characterized by a stagewise constraint that ensures the consistency

between the unobservable marginals of the manipulated and the original

kernels. In an equilibrium of information distortion, the IM minimizes

cumulative cost that depends on the controller’s informationally

manipulated actions generated by the optimal policy to the POMDP. We

discuss ex ante and interim manipulation schemes and show their

connections. The effect of manipulation on the performance of control

policies is analyzed through its influence on belief distortion.







Biography:

Shutian Liu is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Systems

Engineering at City University of Hong Kong. Prior to joining CityU HK,

he obtained Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer

Engineering at New York University, M.S. from the Department of

Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, and B.E. from the

Department of Automation at Tsinghua University. His research interests

lie in game theory, optimization and control theory, risk analytics,

networks, and their applications in multidisciplinary areas such as

adversarial AI, socio-technical systems security, human factors,

misinformation, and public health.