Learning to Infer the Structure of Network Games

Emanuele Rossi, Federico Monti, Yan Leng, Michael M. Bronstein, Xiaowen Dong

Keywords: graphs, networks, game theory, graph neural networks

Abstract:

Strategic interactions between a group of individuals or organisations can be modelled as games played on networks, where a player's payoff depends not only on their actions but also on those of their neighbors.
Inferring the network structure from observed game outcomes (equilibrium actions) is an important problem with numerous potential applications in economics and social sciences.
Currently available methods require the knowledge of the utility function associated with the game, which is often unrealistic to obtain in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a novel transformer-like architecture which correctly accounts for the symmetries of the problem and learns a mapping from the equilibrium actions to the network structure of the game without explicit knowledge of the utility function. We test our method on three different types of network games using both synthetic and real-world data, and demonstrate its effectiveness in network structure inference and superior performance over existing methods.

One-sentence Summary: We propose a novel transformer-like architecture which is able to infer the underlying structure of a network game by only observing the equilibrium actions and without explicit knowledge of the utility function.