Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Qiu, Junnan, Zhao, Yuanjie, Li, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08485
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912756039417856
author Qiu, Junnan
Zhao, Yuanjie
Li, Jie
author_facet Qiu, Junnan
Zhao, Yuanjie
Li, Jie
contents Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables policy optimization from static datasets but is inherently vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. Existing attack strategies typically rely on locally uniform perturbations, which treat all samples indiscriminately. This approach is inefficient, as it wastes the perturbation budget on low-impact samples, and lacks stealthiness due to significant statistical deviations. In this paper, we propose a novel Global Budget Allocation attack strategy. Leveraging the theoretical insight that a sample's influence on value function convergence is proportional to its Temporal Difference (TD) error, we formulate the attack as a global resource allocation problem. We derive a closed-form solution where perturbation magnitudes are assigned proportional to the TD-error sensitivity under a global L2 constraint. Empirical results on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baseline strategies, achieving up to 80% performance degradation with minimal perturbations that evade detection by state-of-the-art statistical and spectral defenses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_08485
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimal Perturbation Budget Allocation for Data Poisoning in Offline Reinforcement Learning
Qiu, Junnan
Zhao, Yuanjie
Li, Jie
Machine Learning
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables policy optimization from static datasets but is inherently vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. Existing attack strategies typically rely on locally uniform perturbations, which treat all samples indiscriminately. This approach is inefficient, as it wastes the perturbation budget on low-impact samples, and lacks stealthiness due to significant statistical deviations. In this paper, we propose a novel Global Budget Allocation attack strategy. Leveraging the theoretical insight that a sample's influence on value function convergence is proportional to its Temporal Difference (TD) error, we formulate the attack as a global resource allocation problem. We derive a closed-form solution where perturbation magnitudes are assigned proportional to the TD-error sensitivity under a global L2 constraint. Empirical results on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baseline strategies, achieving up to 80% performance degradation with minimal perturbations that evade detection by state-of-the-art statistical and spectral defenses.
title Optimal Perturbation Budget Allocation for Data Poisoning in Offline Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08485