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Caspar Oesterheld

13 accepted papers

2026

Promises Made, Promises Kept: Safe Pareto Improvements via Ex Post Verifiable Commitments

AAAI 2026technical

A safe Pareto improvement (SPI) is a modification of a game that leaves all players better off with certainty. SPIs are typically proven under qualitative assumptions about the way different games are played. For example, we assume that strictly dominated strategies can be iteratively removed and

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Computing Game Symmetries and Equilibria That Respect Them

AAAI 2025technical

Strategic interactions can be represented more concisely, and analyzed and solved more efficiently, if we are aware of the symmetries within the multiagent system. Symmetries also have conceptual implications, for example for equilibrium selection. We study the computational complexity of identifyin…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Observation Interference in Partially Observable Assistance Games

ICML 2025poster

We study partially observable assistance games (POAGs), a model of the human-AI value alignment problem which allows the human and the AI assistant to have partial observations. Motivated by concerns of AI deception, we study a qualitatively new phenomenon made possible by partial observability: wou…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Imperfect-Recall Games: Equilibrium Concepts and Their Complexity

IJCAI 2024poster

We investigate optimal decision making under imperfect recall, that is, when an agent forgets information it once held before. An example is the absentminded driver game, as well as team games in which the members have limited communication capabilities. In the framework of extensive-form games with…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Incentivizing honest performative predictions with proper scoring rules

UAI 2023poster

Proper scoring rules incentivize experts to accurately report beliefs, assuming predictions cannot influence outcomes. We relax this assumption and investigate incentives when predictions are performative, i.e., when they can influence the outcome of the prediction, such as when making public predic…

2023

Similarity-based cooperative equilibrium

NeurIPS 2023poster

As machine learning agents act more autonomously in the world, they will increasingly interact with each other. Unfortunately, in many social dilemmas like the one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, standard game theory predicts that ML agents will fail to cooperate with each other. Prior work has shown that…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

The Computational Complexity of Single-Player Imperfect-Recall Games

IJCAI 2023poster

We study single-player extensive-form games with imperfect recall, such as the Sleeping Beauty problem or the Absentminded Driver game. For such games, two natural equilibrium concepts have been proposed as alternative solution concepts to ex-ante optimality. One equilibrium concept uses generalized…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2021

A New Formalism, Method and Open Issues for Zero-Shot Coordination

ICML 2021spotlight

In many coordination problems, independently reasoning humans are able to discover mutually compatible policies. In contrast, independently trained self-play policies are often mutually incompatible. Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) has recently been proposed as a new frontier in multi-agent reinforceme…

2021

Reinforcement Learning in Newcomblike Environments

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

Newcomblike decision problems have been studied extensively in the decision theory literature, but they have so far been largely absent in the reinforcement learning literature. In this paper we study value-based reinforcement learning algorithms in the Newcomblike setting, and answer some of the fu…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar