Tactics of Adversarial Attack on Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents

Tactics of Adversarial Attack on Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents

Yen-Chen Lin, Zhang-Wei Hong, Yuan-Hong Liao, Meng-Li Shih, Ming-Yu Liu, Min Sun

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3756-3762. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/525

We introduce two tactics, namely the strategically-timed attack and the enchanting attack, to attack reinforcement learning agents trained by deep reinforcement learning algorithms using adversarial examples. In the strategically-timed attack, the adversary aims at minimizing the agent's reward by only attacking the agent at a small subset of time steps in an episode. Limiting the attack activity to this subset helps prevent detection of the attack by the agent. We propose a novel method to determine when an adversarial example should be crafted and applied. In the enchanting attack, the adversary aims at luring the agent to a designated target state. This is achieved by combining a generative model and a planning algorithm: while the generative model predicts the future states, the planning algorithm generates a preferred sequence of actions for luring the agent. A sequence of adversarial examples is then crafted to lure the agent to take the preferred sequence of actions. We apply the proposed tactics to the agents trained by the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning algorithm including DQN and A3C. In 5 Atari games, our strategically-timed attack reduces as much reward as the uniform attack (i.e., attacking at every time step) does by attacking the agent 4 times less often. Our enchanting attack lures the agent toward designated target states with a more than 70% success rate. Example videos are available at http://yclin.me/adversarial_attack_RL/.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: AI&Security and Privacy
Machine Learning: Reinforcement Learning
Machine Learning: New Problems
Machine Learning: Deep Learning