English
Related papers

Related papers: Beyond Worst-case Attacks: Robust RL with Adaptive…

200 papers

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies have been shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial noise in observations. Such adversarial noise can have disastrous consequences in safety-critical environments. For instance, a self-driving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Roman Belaire , Pradeep Varakantham , Thanh Nguyen , David Lo

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jialiang Fan , Shixiong Jiang , Mengyu Liu , Fanxin Kong

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

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

We provide a framework for incorporating robustness -- to perturbations in the transition dynamics which we refer to as model misspecification -- into continuous control Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. We specifically focus on…

Model-based reinforcement learning has attracted much attention due to its high sample efficiency and is expected to be applied to real-world robotic applications. In the real world, as unobservable disturbances can lead to unexpected…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Taisuke Kobayashi

A reinforcement learning (RL) control policy could fail in a new/perturbed environment that is different from the training environment, due to the presence of dynamic variations. For controlling systems with continuous state and action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Y. Cheng , P. Zhao , F. Wang , D. J. Block , N. Hovakimyan

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved phenomenal success in various domains. However, its data-driven nature also introduces new vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious opponents. Recent work shows that a well-trained RL agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

We consider the problem of fitting a reinforcement learning (RL) model to some given behavioral data under a multi-armed bandit environment. These models have received much attention in recent years for characterizing human and animal…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Hao Zhu , Jasper Hoffmann , Baohe Zhang , Joschka Boedecker

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

Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Mohamad Sadegh Shirani Faradonbeh

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the challenge of expensive and high-risk data exploration inherent in RL by pre-training policies on vast amounts of offline data, enabling direct deployment or fine-tuning in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Thanh Nguyen , Tung M. Luu , Tri Ton , Chang D. Yoo

Robust reinforcement learning (Robust RL) seeks to handle epistemic uncertainty in environment dynamics, but existing approaches often rely on nested min--max optimization, which is computationally expensive and yields overly conservative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Chenliang Li , Junyu Leng , Jiaxiang Li , Youbang Sun , Shixiang Chen , Shahin Shahrampour , Alfredo Garcia

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

The study of provable adversarial robustness for deep neural networks (DNNs) has mainly focused on static supervised learning tasks such as image classification. However, DNNs have been used extensively in real-world adaptive tasks such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Aounon Kumar , Alexander Levine , Soheil Feizi

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in robotics with complex and heterogeneous dynamics. However, its vulnerability to unknown disturbances and adversarial attacks remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Hanyang Hu , Xilun Zhang , Xubo Lyu , Mo Chen

Bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) problems can often be framed as optimization problems where the goal is to maximize average performance while having access only to stochastic estimates of the true gradient. Traditionally, stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Wesley Chung , Valentin Thomas , Marlos C. Machado , Nicolas Le Roux

The goal of robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn a policy that is robust against the uncertainty in model parameters. Parameter uncertainty commonly occurs in many real-world RL applications due to simulator modeling errors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

We study defense strategies against reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning. As a threat model, we consider attacks that minimally alter rewards to make the attacker's target policy uniquely optimal under the poisoned rewards,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Goran Radanovic