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Related papers: Adaptive Reward-Poisoning Attacks against Reinforc…

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Reinforcement learning (RL) for the Markov Decision Process (MDP) has emerged in many security-related applications, such as autonomous driving, financial decisions, and drone/robot algorithms. In order to improve the robustness/defense of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Ziqing Lu , Lifeng Lai , Weiyu Xu

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

We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Jiarui Gan , Goran Radanovic

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Zhepeng Cen , Huan Zhang , Jie Tan , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

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

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

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

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

To ensure the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real systems, it is crucial to ensure they are robust to noise and adversarial attacks. In adversarial RL, an external attacker has the power to manipulate the victim agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Jeremy McMahan , Young Wu , Xiaojin Zhu , Qiaomin Xie

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely used in tasks where agents interact with an environment to maximize rewards. Building on this foundation, Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) incorporates a cost metric alongside the reward metric,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Weiran Guo , Guanjun Liu , Ziyuan Zhou , Ling Wang

Due to the broad range of applications of reinforcement learning (RL), understanding the effects of adversarial attacks against RL model is essential for the safe applications of this model. Prior theoretical works on adversarial attacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Guanlin Liu , Lifeng Lai

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a subfield of machine learning for training autonomous agents that take sequential actions across complex environments. Despite its significant performance in well-known environments, it remains…

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Both entropy-minimizing and entropy-maximizing (curiosity) objectives for unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) have been shown to be effective in different environments, depending on the environment's level of natural entropy. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Adriana Hugessen , Roger Creus Castanyer , Faisal Mohamed , Glen Berseth

We study the robustness of reinforcement learning (RL) with adversarially perturbed state observations, which aligns with the setting of many adversarial attacks to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and is also important for rolling out…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Huan Zhang , Hongge Chen , Duane Boning , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Learning new task-specific skills from a few trials is a fundamental challenge for artificial intelligence. Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) tackles this problem by learning transferable policies that support few-shot adaptation to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Zhizhou Ren , Anji Liu , Yitao Liang , Jian Peng , Jianzhu Ma

A reinforcement learning (RL) policy trained in a nominal environment could fail in a new/perturbed environment due to the existence of dynamic variations. Existing robust methods try to obtain a fixed policy for all envisioned dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-10 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Manan Gandhi , Bo Li , Evangelos Theodorou , Naira Hovakimyan