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Reinforcement learning algorithms, just like any other Machine learning algorithm pose a serious threat from adversaries. The adversaries can manipulate the learning algorithm resulting in non-optimal policies. In this paper, we analyze the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-12 Aqeel Anwar , Arijit Raychowdhury

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, enabling autonomous systems to learn and adapt to dynamic environments by optimizing a reward function. However, this reliance on reward signals creates a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Bokang Zhang , Chaojun Lu , Jianhui Li , Junfeng Wu

The use of reinforcement learning (RL) in scientific applications, such as materials design and automated chemistry, is increasing. A major challenge, however, lies in fact that measuring the state of the system is often costly and time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Colin Bellinger , Andriy Drozdyuk , Mark Crowley , Isaac Tamblyn

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has become an appealing solution to algorithmic trading such as high frequency trading of stocks and cyptocurrencies. However, DRL have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks. It follows that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-24 Yaser Faghan , Nancirose Piazza , Vahid Behzadan , Ali Fathi

This study investigates behavior-targeted attacks on reinforcement learning and their countermeasures. Behavior-targeted attacks aim to manipulate the victim's behavior as desired by the adversary through adversarial interventions in state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Shojiro Yamabe , Kazuto Fukuchi , Jun Sakuma

By leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics, QML opens doors to novel approaches in machine learning and offers potential speedup. However, machine learning models are well-documented to be vulnerable to malicious manipulations, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Bacui Li , Tansu Alpcan , Chandra Thapa , Udaya Parampalli

Most reinforcement learning algorithms implicitly assume strong synchrony. We present novel attacks targeting Q-learning that exploit a vulnerability entailed by this assumption by delaying the reward signal for a limited time period. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-09 Anindya Sarkar , Jiarui Feng , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik , Christopher Gill , Ning Zhang

As machine learning becomes widely used for automated decisions, attackers have strong incentives to manipulate the results and models generated by machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we perform the first systematic study of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Matthew Jagielski , Alina Oprea , Battista Biggio , Chang Liu , Cristina Nita-Rotaru , Bo Li

Switching costs, which capture the costs for changing policies, are regarded as a critical metric in reinforcement learning (RL), in addition to the standard metric of losses (or rewards). However, existing studies on switching costs (with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness Shroff

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in fields like robotics and autonomous driving, but adversarial attacks designed to mislead RL systems remain challenging. Existing approaches often rely on modifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Junyong Jiang , Buwei Tian , Chenxing Xu , Songze Li , Lu Dong

Adversarial training in reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging because perturbations cascade through trajectories and compound over time, making fixed-strength attacks either overly destructive or too conservative. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Lucas Schott , Elies Gherbi , Hatem Hajri , Sylvain Lamprier

In offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents estimate policies from a given dataset. We study reward-poisoning attacks in this setting where an exogenous attacker modifies the rewards in the dataset before the agents see the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Young Wu , Jeremy McMahan , Xiaojin Zhu , Qiaomin Xie

Deep learning classifiers are known to be inherently vulnerable to manipulation by intentionally perturbed inputs, named adversarial examples. In this work, we establish that reinforcement learning techniques based on Deep Q-Networks (DQNs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-17 Vahid Behzadan , Arslan Munir

In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Sreejeet Maity , Aritra Mitra

We study reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning (RL), where an adversary manipulates rewards within constrained budgets to force the target RL agent to adopt a policy that aligns with the attacker's objectives. Prior works on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jose Efraim Aguilar Escamilla , Haoyang Hong , Jiawei Li , Haoyu Zhao , Xuezhou Zhang , Sanghyun Hong , Huazheng Wang

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) focuses on designing policies that achieve good performance under model uncertainties. The goal is to maximize the worst-case long-term discounted reward, where the data for RL comes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Saptarshi Mandal , Yashaswini Murthy , R. Srikant

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies are known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations to their observations, similar to adversarial examples for classifiers. However, an attacker is not usually able to directly modify another…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Adam Gleave , Michael Dennis , Cody Wild , Neel Kant , Sergey Levine , Stuart Russell

This paper presents a review of the field of reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on providing a comprehensive overview of the key concepts, techniques, and algorithms for beginners. RL has a unique setting, jargon, and mathematics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Mohamed-Amine Chadi , Hajar Mousannif