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Main Authors: Guo, Weiqi, Liu, Guanjun, Zhou, Ziyuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13262
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author Guo, Weiqi
Liu, Guanjun
Zhou, Ziyuan
author_facet Guo, Weiqi
Liu, Guanjun
Zhou, Ziyuan
contents Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) has shown potential for cooperative and competitive tasks such as autonomous driving and strategic gaming. However, models trained by MADRL are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations on states and actions. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the robustness of MADRL models from an attack perspective. Existing studies focus on either state-only attacks or action-only attacks, but do not consider how to effectively joint them. Simply combining state and action perturbations such as randomly perturbing states and actions does not exploit their potential synergistic effects. In this paper, we propose the State-Action Joint Attack (SAJA) framework that has a good synergistic effects. SAJA consists of two important phases: (1) In the state attack phase, a multi-step gradient ascent method utilizes both the actor network and the critic network to compute an adversarial state, and (2) in the action attack phase, based on the perturbed state, a second gradient ascent uses the critic network to craft the final adversarial action. Additionally, a heuristic regularizer measuring the distance between the perturbed actions and the original clean ones is added into the loss function to enhance the effectiveness of the critic's guidance. We evaluate SAJA in the Multi-Agent Particle Environment (MPE), demonstrating that (1) it outperforms and is more stealthy than state-only or action-only attacks, and (2) existing state or action defense methods cannot defend its attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13262
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAJA: A State-Action Joint Attack Framework on Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
Guo, Weiqi
Liu, Guanjun
Zhou, Ziyuan
Artificial Intelligence
Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) has shown potential for cooperative and competitive tasks such as autonomous driving and strategic gaming. However, models trained by MADRL are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations on states and actions. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the robustness of MADRL models from an attack perspective. Existing studies focus on either state-only attacks or action-only attacks, but do not consider how to effectively joint them. Simply combining state and action perturbations such as randomly perturbing states and actions does not exploit their potential synergistic effects. In this paper, we propose the State-Action Joint Attack (SAJA) framework that has a good synergistic effects. SAJA consists of two important phases: (1) In the state attack phase, a multi-step gradient ascent method utilizes both the actor network and the critic network to compute an adversarial state, and (2) in the action attack phase, based on the perturbed state, a second gradient ascent uses the critic network to craft the final adversarial action. Additionally, a heuristic regularizer measuring the distance between the perturbed actions and the original clean ones is added into the loss function to enhance the effectiveness of the critic's guidance. We evaluate SAJA in the Multi-Agent Particle Environment (MPE), demonstrating that (1) it outperforms and is more stealthy than state-only or action-only attacks, and (2) existing state or action defense methods cannot defend its attacks.
title SAJA: A State-Action Joint Attack Framework on Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13262