Incentive-Aware AI Safety via Strategic Resource Allocation: A Stackelberg Security Games Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kim, Cheol Woo, Choo, Davin, Neoh, Tzeh Yuan, Tambe, Milind
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Kim, Cheol Woo
Choo, Davin
Neoh, Tzeh Yuan
Tambe, Milind
author_facet Kim, Cheol Woo
Choo, Davin
Neoh, Tzeh Yuan
Tambe, Milind
contents As AI systems grow more capable and autonomous, ensuring their safety and reliability requires not only model-level alignment but also strategic oversight of the humans and institutions involved in their development and deployment. Existing safety frameworks largely treat alignment as a static optimization problem (e.g., tuning models to desired behavior) while overlooking the dynamic, adversarial incentives that shape how data are collected, how models are evaluated, and how they are ultimately deployed. We propose a new perspective on AI safety grounded in Stackelberg Security Games (SSGs): a class of game-theoretic models designed for adversarial resource allocation under uncertainty. By viewing AI oversight as a strategic interaction between defenders (auditors, evaluators, and deployers) and attackers (malicious actors, misaligned contributors, or worst-case failure modes), SSGs provide a unifying framework for reasoning about incentive design, limited oversight capacity, and adversarial uncertainty across the AI lifecycle. We illustrate how this framework can inform (1) training-time auditing against data/feedback poisoning, (2) pre-deployment evaluation under constrained reviewer resources, and (3) robust multi-model deployment in adversarial environments. This synthesis bridges algorithmic alignment and institutional oversight design, highlighting how game-theoretic deterrence can make AI oversight proactive, risk-aware, and resilient to manipulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Incentive-Aware AI Safety via Strategic Resource Allocation: A Stackelberg Security Games Perspective
Kim, Cheol Woo
Choo, Davin
Neoh, Tzeh Yuan
Tambe, Milind
Artificial Intelligence
As AI systems grow more capable and autonomous, ensuring their safety and reliability requires not only model-level alignment but also strategic oversight of the humans and institutions involved in their development and deployment. Existing safety frameworks largely treat alignment as a static optimization problem (e.g., tuning models to desired behavior) while overlooking the dynamic, adversarial incentives that shape how data are collected, how models are evaluated, and how they are ultimately deployed. We propose a new perspective on AI safety grounded in Stackelberg Security Games (SSGs): a class of game-theoretic models designed for adversarial resource allocation under uncertainty. By viewing AI oversight as a strategic interaction between defenders (auditors, evaluators, and deployers) and attackers (malicious actors, misaligned contributors, or worst-case failure modes), SSGs provide a unifying framework for reasoning about incentive design, limited oversight capacity, and adversarial uncertainty across the AI lifecycle. We illustrate how this framework can inform (1) training-time auditing against data/feedback poisoning, (2) pre-deployment evaluation under constrained reviewer resources, and (3) robust multi-model deployment in adversarial environments. This synthesis bridges algorithmic alignment and institutional oversight design, highlighting how game-theoretic deterrence can make AI oversight proactive, risk-aware, and resilient to manipulation.
title Incentive-Aware AI Safety via Strategic Resource Allocation: A Stackelberg Security Games Perspective
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07259