Adversarial Inception Backdoor Attacks against Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rathbun, Ethan, Oprea, Alina, Amato, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912409967394816
author Rathbun, Ethan
Oprea, Alina
Amato, Christopher
author_facet Rathbun, Ethan
Oprea, Alina
Amato, Christopher
contents Recent works have demonstrated the vulnerability of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms against training-time, backdoor poisoning attacks. The objectives of these attacks are twofold: induce pre-determined, adversarial behavior in the agent upon observing a fixed trigger during deployment while allowing the agent to solve its intended task during training. Prior attacks assume arbitrary control over the agent's rewards, inducing values far outside the environment's natural constraints. This results in brittle attacks that fail once the proper reward constraints are enforced. Thus, in this work we propose a new class of backdoor attacks against DRL which are the first to achieve state of the art performance under strict reward constraints. These "inception" attacks manipulate the agent's training data -- inserting the trigger into prior observations and replacing high return actions with those of the targeted adversarial behavior. We formally define these attacks and prove they achieve both adversarial objectives against arbitrary Markov Decision Processes (MDP). Using this framework we devise an online inception attack which achieves an 100\% attack success rate on multiple environments under constrained rewards while minimally impacting the agent's task performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_13995
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adversarial Inception Backdoor Attacks against Reinforcement Learning
Rathbun, Ethan
Oprea, Alina
Amato, Christopher
Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
Recent works have demonstrated the vulnerability of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms against training-time, backdoor poisoning attacks. The objectives of these attacks are twofold: induce pre-determined, adversarial behavior in the agent upon observing a fixed trigger during deployment while allowing the agent to solve its intended task during training. Prior attacks assume arbitrary control over the agent's rewards, inducing values far outside the environment's natural constraints. This results in brittle attacks that fail once the proper reward constraints are enforced. Thus, in this work we propose a new class of backdoor attacks against DRL which are the first to achieve state of the art performance under strict reward constraints. These "inception" attacks manipulate the agent's training data -- inserting the trigger into prior observations and replacing high return actions with those of the targeted adversarial behavior. We formally define these attacks and prove they achieve both adversarial objectives against arbitrary Markov Decision Processes (MDP). Using this framework we devise an online inception attack which achieves an 100\% attack success rate on multiple environments under constrained rewards while minimally impacting the agent's task performance.
title Adversarial Inception Backdoor Attacks against Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13995