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Main Authors: Huang, Tairan, Jin, Yulin, Liu, Junxu, Ye, Qingqing, Hu, Haibo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09681
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author Huang, Tairan
Jin, Yulin
Liu, Junxu
Ye, Qingqing
Hu, Haibo
author_facet Huang, Tairan
Jin, Yulin
Liu, Junxu
Ye, Qingqing
Hu, Haibo
contents Visual reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable progress in visual control and robotics, but its vulnerability to adversarial perturbations remains underexplored. Most existing black-box attacks focus on vector-based or discrete-action RL, and their effectiveness on image-based continuous control is limited by the large action space and excessive environment queries. We propose SEBA, a sample-efficient framework for black-box adversarial attacks on visual RL agents. SEBA integrates a shadow Q model that estimates cumulative rewards under adversarial conditions, a generative adversarial network that produces visually imperceptible perturbations, and a world model that simulates environment dynamics to reduce real-world queries. Through a two-stage iterative training procedure that alternates between learning the shadow model and refining the generator, SEBA achieves strong attack performance while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari benchmarks show that SEBA significantly reduces cumulative rewards, preserves visual fidelity, and greatly decreases environment interactions compared to prior black-box and white-box methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09681
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SEBA: Sample-Efficient Black-Box Attacks on Visual Reinforcement Learning
Huang, Tairan
Jin, Yulin
Liu, Junxu
Ye, Qingqing
Hu, Haibo
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Visual reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable progress in visual control and robotics, but its vulnerability to adversarial perturbations remains underexplored. Most existing black-box attacks focus on vector-based or discrete-action RL, and their effectiveness on image-based continuous control is limited by the large action space and excessive environment queries. We propose SEBA, a sample-efficient framework for black-box adversarial attacks on visual RL agents. SEBA integrates a shadow Q model that estimates cumulative rewards under adversarial conditions, a generative adversarial network that produces visually imperceptible perturbations, and a world model that simulates environment dynamics to reduce real-world queries. Through a two-stage iterative training procedure that alternates between learning the shadow model and refining the generator, SEBA achieves strong attack performance while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on MuJoCo and Atari benchmarks show that SEBA significantly reduces cumulative rewards, preserves visual fidelity, and greatly decreases environment interactions compared to prior black-box and white-box methods.
title SEBA: Sample-Efficient Black-Box Attacks on Visual Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09681