Research
Safe Observation Capacity for Opponent Exploitation under Showdown Censoring
A safe method for learning exploitable opponent behavior when folds censor private-card observations.
Central Question
How can an agent acquire strategically useful private-card data while preserving a guaranteed value floor?
Main Contribution
The paper defines safe observation capacity, which measures the largest target reach available under a specified value slack. Safe Active De-censoring combines public screening, an independent reveal batch, and robust deployment.
A sequence-form construction recovers censored fold mass on reveal-certified histories. The resulting capacity frontier is concave and piecewise linear, with an initial slope determined by the safety floor’s shadow price.
The experiments improve certified gains over public-only collection. A separate audit-refit-deploy study detects all 30 simulation seeds and no control seed.
Citation
[1] J. Guo, “Safe Observation Capacity for Opponent Exploitation under Showdown Censoring,” arXiv:2608.09954, 2026, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2608.09954.