Games Over Observation Spaces in Multi-Agent Capture the Flag

Mae Frost; Michael Amir; Shaunak D. Bopardikar

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arXiv · 2609.06178

Games Over Observation Spaces in Multi-Agent Capture the Flag

Mae Frost·Michael Amir·Shaunak D. Bopardikar

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Abstract

We consider a multi-agent Capture the Flag (CtF) scenario in a graph-based environment, where a team of attackers seeks to reach designated flag vertices while a defending team attempts to intercept them. In our setting, both teams operate using decentralized heuristic policies. While the attacking team may choose its heuristic from a diverse library of policies, the defense is restricted to playing a single fixed policy. To overcome this limitation, a centralized defense oracle strategically restricts the portion of the graph visible to each of its agents in order to elicit a wider range of emergent behaviors from its fixed policy. We formalize this interaction as a two-player zero-sum game, where the attacker reasons over its library of heuristics and the defense reasons over the combinatorial space of visibility profiles. To solve this intractably large game, we propose a Double Oracle algorithm to find approximate empirical equilibria, and we empirically validate that observation manipulation can improve the defense's performance.

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Mae Frost, Michael Amir, Shaunak D. Bopardikar. 2026-09-05. Games Over Observation Spaces in Multi-Agent Capture the Flag. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06178

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