This paper investigates the effectiveness of adversarial training in enhancing the robustness of Deep Q-Network (DQN) policies to state-space perturbations. We first present a formal analysis of adversarial training in DQN agents and its performance with respect to the proportion of adversarial perturbations to nominal observations used for training. Next, we consider the sample-inefficiency of current adversarial training techniques, and propose a novel Adversarially-Guided Exploration (AGE) mechanism based on a modified hybrid of the ϵ-greedy algorithm and Boltzmann exploration. We verify the feasibility of this exploration mechanism through experimental evaluation of its performance in comparison with the traditional decaying ϵ-greedy and parameter-space noise exploration algorithms.
@article{arxiv.1906.01119,
title = {Analysis and Improvement of Adversarial Training in DQN Agents With Adversarially-Guided Exploration (AGE)},
author = {Vahid Behzadan and William Hsu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.01119},
year = {2019}
}