Optimal Attack and Defense for Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: McMahan, Jeremy, Wu, Young, Zhu, Xiaojin, Xie, Qiaomin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929387642814464
author McMahan, Jeremy
Wu, Young
Zhu, Xiaojin
Xie, Qiaomin
author_facet McMahan, Jeremy
Wu, Young
Zhu, Xiaojin
Xie, Qiaomin
contents To ensure the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real systems, it is crucial to ensure they are robust to noise and adversarial attacks. In adversarial RL, an external attacker has the power to manipulate the victim agent's interaction with the environment. We study the full class of online manipulation attacks, which include (i) state attacks, (ii) observation attacks (which are a generalization of perceived-state attacks), (iii) action attacks, and (iv) reward attacks. We show the attacker's problem of designing a stealthy attack that maximizes its own expected reward, which often corresponds to minimizing the victim's value, is captured by a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that we call a meta-MDP since it is not the true environment but a higher level environment induced by the attacked interaction. We show that the attacker can derive optimal attacks by planning in polynomial time or learning with polynomial sample complexity using standard RL techniques. We argue that the optimal defense policy for the victim can be computed as the solution to a stochastic Stackelberg game, which can be further simplified into a partially-observable turn-based stochastic game (POTBSG). Neither the attacker nor the victim would benefit from deviating from their respective optimal policies, thus such solutions are truly robust. Although the defense problem is NP-hard, we show that optimal Markovian defenses can be computed (learned) in polynomial time (sample complexity) in many scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_00198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimal Attack and Defense for Reinforcement Learning
McMahan, Jeremy
Wu, Young
Zhu, Xiaojin
Xie, Qiaomin
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Computer Science and Game Theory
To ensure the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real systems, it is crucial to ensure they are robust to noise and adversarial attacks. In adversarial RL, an external attacker has the power to manipulate the victim agent's interaction with the environment. We study the full class of online manipulation attacks, which include (i) state attacks, (ii) observation attacks (which are a generalization of perceived-state attacks), (iii) action attacks, and (iv) reward attacks. We show the attacker's problem of designing a stealthy attack that maximizes its own expected reward, which often corresponds to minimizing the victim's value, is captured by a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that we call a meta-MDP since it is not the true environment but a higher level environment induced by the attacked interaction. We show that the attacker can derive optimal attacks by planning in polynomial time or learning with polynomial sample complexity using standard RL techniques. We argue that the optimal defense policy for the victim can be computed as the solution to a stochastic Stackelberg game, which can be further simplified into a partially-observable turn-based stochastic game (POTBSG). Neither the attacker nor the victim would benefit from deviating from their respective optimal policies, thus such solutions are truly robust. Although the defense problem is NP-hard, we show that optimal Markovian defenses can be computed (learned) in polynomial time (sample complexity) in many scenarios.
title Optimal Attack and Defense for Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00198