English

Policy Resilience to Environment Poisoning Attacks on Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2023-04-25 v1 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

This paper investigates policy resilience to training-environment poisoning attacks on reinforcement learning (RL) policies, with the goal of recovering the deployment performance of a poisoned RL policy. Due to the fact that the policy resilience is an add-on concern to RL algorithms, it should be resource-efficient, time-conserving, and widely applicable without compromising the performance of RL algorithms. This paper proposes such a policy-resilience mechanism based on an idea of knowledge sharing. We summarize the policy resilience as three stages: preparation, diagnosis, recovery. Specifically, we design the mechanism as a federated architecture coupled with a meta-learning manner, pursuing an efficient extraction and sharing of the environment knowledge. With the shared knowledge, a poisoned agent can quickly identify the deployment condition and accordingly recover its policy performance. We empirically evaluate the resilience mechanism for both model-based and model-free RL algorithms, showing its effectiveness and efficiency in restoring the deployment performance of a poisoned policy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.12151,
  title  = {Policy Resilience to Environment Poisoning Attacks on Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Hang Xu and Xinghua Qu and Zinovi Rabinovich},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.12151},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:15:55.108Z