Parametric Value Approximation for General-sum Differential Games with State Constraints

Abstract

General-sum differential games can approximate values solved by Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaacs (HJI) equations for efficient inference when information is incomplete. However, solving such games through conventional methods encounters the curse of dimensionality (CoD). Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) offer a scalable approach to alleviate the CoD and approximate values, but there exist convergence issues for value approximations through vanilla PINNs when state constraints lead to values with large Lipschitz constants, particularly in safety-critical applications. In addition to addressing CoD, it is necessary to learn a generalizable value across a parametric space of games, rather than training multiple ones for each specific player-type configuration. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Hybrid Neural Operator (HNO), which is an operator that can map parameter functions for games to value functions. HNO leverages informative supervised data and samples PDE-driven data across entire spatial-temporal space for model refinement. We evaluate HNO on 9D and 13D scenarios with nonlinear dynamics and state constraints, comparing it against a Supervised Neural Operator (a variant of DeepONet). Under the same computational budget and training data, HNO outperforms SNO for safety performance. This work provides a step toward scalable and generalizable value function approximation, enabling real-time inference for complex human-robot or multi-agent interactions.