Optimal Deceptive and Reference Policies for Supervisory Control

The use of deceptive strategies is important for an agent that attempts not to reveal his intentions in an adversarial environment. We consider a setting in which a supervisor provides a reference policy and expects an agent to follow the reference policy and perform a task. The agent may instead follow a different, deceptive policy to achieve a different task. We model the environment and the behavior of the agent with a Markov decision process, represent the tasks of the agent and the supervisor with linear temporal logic formulae, and study the synthesis of optimal deceptive policies for such agents. We also study the synthesis of optimal reference policies that prevents deceptive strategies of the agent and achieves the supervisor's task with high probability. We show that the synthesis of deceptive policies has a convex optimization problem formulation, while the synthesis of reference policies requires solving a nonconvex optimization problem.