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We propose the first black-box targeted attack against online deep reinforcement learning through reward poisoning during training time. Our attack is applicable to general environments with unknown dynamics learned by unknown algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Yinglun Xu , Gagandeep Singh

In reward-poisoning attacks against reinforcement learning (RL), an attacker can perturb the environment reward $r_t$ into $r_t+\delta_t$ at each step, with the goal of forcing the RL agent to learn a nefarious policy. We categorize such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe Ma , Adish Singla , Xiaojin Zhu

We study black-box reward poisoning attacks against reinforcement learning (RL), in which an adversary aims to manipulate the rewards to mislead a sequence of RL agents with unknown algorithms to learn a nefarious policy in an environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Amin Rakhsha , Xuezhou Zhang , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Recent work has identified that classification models implemented as neural networks are vulnerable to data-poisoning and Trojan attacks at training time. In this work, we show that these training-time vulnerabilities extend to deep…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-03-18 Panagiota Kiourti , Kacper Wardega , Susmit Jha , Wenchao Li

Targeted data poisoning attacks manipulate model predictions on specific test samples by injecting malicious data into training. Yet existing evaluations report average attack success rates over randomly selected targets, obscuring true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 William Xu , Chenyu Zhang , Yihan Wang , Matthew Y. R. Yang , Zuoqiu Liu , Gautam Kamath , Yaoliang Yu , Yiwei Lu

We study data poisoning attacks in the online setting where training items arrive sequentially, and the attacker may perturb the current item to manipulate online learning. Importantly, the attacker has no knowledge of future training items…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Xuezhou Zhang , Xiaojin Zhu , Laurent Lessard

Data poisoning is a training-time attack that undermines the trustworthiness of learned models. In a targeted data poisoning attack, an adversary manipulates the training dataset to alter the classification of a targeted test point. Given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Nakshatra Gupta , Sumanth Prabhu , Supratik Chakraborty , R Venkatesh

Federated learning distributes model training among a multitude of agents, who, guided by privacy concerns, perform training using their local data but share only model parameter updates, for iterative aggregation at the server. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Arjun Nitin Bhagoji , Supriyo Chakraborty , Prateek Mittal , Seraphin Calo

We study data poisoning attacks in learning from human preferences. More specifically, we consider the problem of teaching/enforcing a target policy $\pi^\dagger$ by synthesizing preference data. We seek to understand the susceptibility of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Andi Nika , Jonathan Nöther , Debmalya Mandal , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla , Goran Radanović

We introduce two tactics to attack agents trained by deep reinforcement learning algorithms using adversarial examples, namely the strategically-timed attack and the enchanting attack. In the strategically-timed attack, the adversary aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Yen-Chen Lin , Zhang-Wei Hong , Yuan-Hong Liao , Meng-Li Shih , Ming-Yu Liu , Min Sun

In targeted poisoning attacks, an attacker manipulates an agent-environment interaction to force the agent into adopting a policy of interest, called target policy. Prior work has primarily focused on attacks that modify standard MDP…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Mohammad Mohammadi , Jonathan Nöther , Debmalya Mandal , Adish Singla , Goran Radanovic

This paper investigates poisoning attacks against data-driven control methods. This work is motivated by recent trends showing that, in supervised learning, slightly modifying the data in a malicious manner can drastically deteriorate the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-11 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have led to recent successes in solving complex games, such as Atari or Starcraft, and to a huge impact in real-world applications, such as cybersecurity or autonomous driving. In the side of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Rubén Majadas , Javier García , Fernando Fernández

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an actively growing field that is seeing increased usage in real-world, safety-critical applications -- making it paramount to ensure the robustness of RL algorithms against adversarial attacks. In this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Ethan Rathbun , Christopher Amato , Alina Oprea

Machine learning models have achieved great success in supervised learning tasks for end-to-end training, which requires a large amount of labeled data that is not always feasible. Recently, many practitioners have shifted to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Yiwei Lu , Matthew Y. R. Yang , Gautam Kamath , Yaoliang Yu

Instruction tuning is an effective technique to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents. In this work, we investigate how an adversary can exploit instruction tuning by injecting specific instruction-following examples into…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Manli Shu , Jiongxiao Wang , Chen Zhu , Jonas Geiping , Chaowei Xiao , Tom Goldstein

Machine learning has become an important component for many systems and applications including computer vision, spam filtering, malware and network intrusion detection, among others. Despite the capabilities of machine learning algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-14 Andrea Paudice , Luis Muñoz-González , Andras Gyorgy , Emil C. Lupu

Machine learning algorithms are vulnerable to poisoning attacks: An adversary can inject malicious points in the training dataset to influence the learning process and degrade the algorithm's performance. Optimal poisoning attacks have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-26 Luis Muñoz-González , Bjarne Pfitzner , Matteo Russo , Javier Carnerero-Cano , Emil C. Lupu

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

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