# Heterogeneous Roles against Assignment Based Policies in Two vs Two Target Defense Game

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09302 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09302/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 14 Sep 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Game-Theory-Assisted Reinforcement Learning for Border Defense: Early Termination based on Analytical Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15907/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we consider a target defense game in which the attacker team seeks to reach a high-value target while the defender team seeks to prevent that by capturing them away from the target. To address the curse of dimensionality, a popular approach to solve such team-vs-team game is to decompose it into a set of one-vs-one games. Such an approximation assumes independence between teammates assigned to different one-vs-one games, ignoring the possibility of a richer set of cooperative behaviors, ultimately leading to suboptimality. In this paper, we provide teammate-aware strategies for the attacker team and show that they can outperform the assignment-based strategy, if the defenders still employ an assignment-based strategy. More specifically, the attacker strategy involves heterogeneous roles where one attacker actively intercepts a defender to help its teammate reach the target. We provide sufficient conditions under which such a strategy benefits the attackers, and we validate the results using numerical simulations.