The Intelligent Disobedience Game: Formulating Disobedience in Stackelberg Games and Markov Decision Processes
In shared autonomy, a critical tension arises when an automated assistant must choose between obeying a human's instruction and deliberately overriding it to prevent harm. This safety-critical behavior is known as intelligent disobedience. To formalize this dynamic, this paper introduces the Intelligent Disobedience Game (IDG), a sequential game-theoretic framework based on Stackelberg games that models the interaction between a human leader and an assistive follower operating under asymmetric information. It characterizes optimal strategies for both agents across multi-step scenarios, identifying strategic phenomena such as ``safety traps,'' where the system indefinitely avoids harm but ...
| Authors | Benedikt Hornig, Reuth Mirsky |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 22 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 March 2026 |
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