An Algorithm for Resilient Nash Equilibrium Seeking in the Partial Information Setting

Current research in distributed Nash equilibrium (NE) seeking in the partial information setting assumes that information is exchanged between agents that are “truthful.” However, in general noncooperative games, agents may consider sending misinformation to neighboring agents with the goal of further reducing their cost. In addition, communication networks are vulnerable to attacks from agents outside the game as well as communication failures. In this article, we propose a distributed NE seeking algorithm that is robust against adversarial agents that transmit noise, random signals, constant singles, deceitful messages, as well as being resilient to external factors such as dropped communication, jammed signals, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The core issue that makes the problem challenging is that agents have no means of verifying if the information they receive is correct, i.e., there is no “ground truth.” To address this problem, we use an observation graph, which gives truthful action information, in conjunction with a communication graph, which gives (potentially incorrect) information. By filtering information obtained from these two graphs, we show that our algorithm is resilient against adversarial agents and converges to the NE.