Bounded Reasoning: Cognitive Hierarchy in Human-versus-AI Cyber Defense
Zahra Aref, Sheng Wei, Narayan B. Mandayam
Abstract
Human-agent evaluations often compress interaction into a single performance score, even when human and automated policies adapt differently over time. We study this in a sequential cyber-defense game on an attack graph, where a human or reinforcement-learning defender protects cloud assets against a Deep Q-Network (DQN) attacker. We compare four defender settings: a human reward-only game operationalizing the DQN information structure, a human reward-plus-transition game operationalizing the Cognitive Hierarchy Theory-driven DQN (CHT-DQN) information structure, an automated DQN defender, and an automated CHT-DQN defender. In the reward-only game, participants receive payoff and reward feedback. In the reward-plus-transition game, they also see attacker-aware transition probabilities from the CHT-DQN model. Across 80 Mechanical Turk participants and matched automated simulations, human defenders adapted to outcomes in a way the automated defenders did not: they were more likely to reselect a node after a successful defense than after a failure, in both games, an asymmetry we interpret as consistent with Prospect Theory and Cumulative Prospect Theory. The 40-round average also mixes early rounds, where the DQN attacker acts mostly at random, with late rounds, where it mostly exploits; in the final stage, mean protection ranks the reward-plus-transition human game above the reward-only human game, then the automated CHT-DQN defender, then the automated DQN defender, an ordering the overall mean hides. By contrast, the reward-plus-transition game does not produce a statistically reliable overall gain in weighted data protection over the reward-only game. These results suggest that evaluating human-agent cyber-defense systems only by an averaged task score can miss behaviorally meaningful differences in adaptation, action allocation, and bounded human reasoning.