skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: ACADIA: Efficient and Robust Adversarial Attacks Against Deep Reinforcement Learning
Existing adversarial algorithms for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have largely focused on identifying an optimal time to attack a DRL agent. However, little work has been explored in injecting efficient adversarial perturbations in DRL environments. We propose a suite of novel DRL adversarial attacks, called ACADIA, representing AttaCks Against Deep reInforcement leArning. ACADIA provides a set of efficient and robust perturbation-based adversarial attacks to disturb the DRL agent's decision-making based on novel combinations of techniques utilizing momentum, ADAM optimizer (i.e., Root Mean Square Propagation, or RMSProp), and initial randomization. These kinds of DRL attacks with novel integration of such techniques have not been studied in the existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and DRL research. We consider two well-known DRL algorithms, Deep-Q Learning Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), under Atari games and MuJoCo where both targeted and non-targeted attacks are considered with or without the state-of-the-art defenses in DRL (i.e., RADIAL and ATLA). Our results demonstrate that the proposed ACADIA outperforms existing gradient-based counterparts under a wide range of experimental settings. ACADIA is nine times faster than the state-of-the-art Carlini & Wagner (CW) method with better performance under defenses of DRL.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2107450
PAR ID:
10447128
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security} (CNS)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 9
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We present TrojDRL, a tool for exploring and evaluating backdoor attacks on deep reinforcement learning agents.TrojDRL exploits the sequential nature of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and considers different gradations of threat models. We show that untargeted attacks on state-of-the-art actor-critic algorithms can circumvent existing defenses built on the assumption of backdoors being targeted. We evaluated TrojDRL on a broad set of DRL benchmarks and showed that the attacks require only poisoning as little as 0.025% of the training data. Compared with existing works of backdoor attacks on classification models, TrojDRL provides a first step towards understanding the vulnerability of DRL agents. 
    more » « less
  2. Recent works have demonstrated the vulnerability of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms against training-time, backdoor poisoning attacks. The objectives of these attacks are twofold: induce pre-determined, adversarial behavior in the agent upon observing a fixed trigger during deployment while allowing the agent to solve its intended task during training. Prior attacks assume arbitrary control over the agent's rewards, inducing values far outside the environment's natural constraints. This results in brittle attacks that fail once the proper reward constraints are enforced. Thus, in this work we propose a new class of backdoor attacks against DRL which are the first to achieve state of the art performance under strict reward constraints. These ``inception'' attacks manipulate the agent's training data -- inserting the trigger into prior observations and replacing high return actions with those of the targeted adversarial behavior. We formally define these attacks and prove they achieve both adversarial objectives against arbitrary Markov Decision Processes (MDP). Using this framework we devise an online inception attack which achieves an 100% attack success rate on multiple environments under constrained rewards while minimally impacting the agent's task performance. 
    more » « less
  3. Various methods for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have been developed with the assumption that agents’ policies are based on accurate state information. However, policies learned through Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) are susceptible to adversarial state perturbation attacks. In this work, we propose a State-Adversarial Markov Game (SAMG) and make the first attempt to investigate different solution concepts of MARL under state uncertainties. Our analysis shows that the commonly used solution concepts of optimal agent policy and robust Nash equilibrium do not always exist in SAMGs. To circumvent this difficulty, we consider a new solution concept called robust agent policy, where agents aim to maximize the worst-case expected state value. We prove the existence of robust agent policy for finite state and finite action SAMGs. Additionally, we propose a Robust Multi-Agent Adversarial Actor-Critic (RMA3C) algorithm to learn robust policies for MARL agents under state uncertainties. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms existing methods when faced with state perturbations and greatly improves the robustness of MARL policies. Our code is public on https://songyanghan.github.io/what_is_solution/. 
    more » « less
  4. Various methods for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have been developed with the assumption that agents' policies are based on accurate state information. However, policies learned through Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) are susceptible to adversarial state perturbation attacks. In this work, we propose a State-Adversarial Markov Game (SAMG) and make the first attempt to investigate different solution concepts of MARL under state uncertainties. Our analysis shows that the commonly used solution concepts of optimal agent policy and robust Nash equilibrium do not always exist in SAMGs. To circumvent this difficulty, we consider a new solution concept called robust agent policy, where agents aim to maximize the worst-case expected state value. We prove the existence of robust agent policy for finite state and finite action SAMGs. Additionally, we propose a Robust Multi-Agent Adversarial Actor-Critic (RMA3C) algorithm to learn robust policies for MARL agents under state uncertainties. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms existing methods when faced with state perturbations and greatly improves the robustness of MARL policies. Our code is public on https://songyanghan.github.io/what_is_solution/. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Machine learning applied to architecture design presents a promising opportunity with broad applications. Recent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques, in particular, enable efficient exploration in vast design spaces where conventional design strategies may be inadequate. This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement framework, taking routerless networks-on-chip (NoC) as an evaluation case study. The new framework successfully resolves problems with prior design approaches, which are either unreliable due to random searches or inflexible due to severe design space restrictions. The framework learns (near-)optimal loop placement for routerless NoCs with various design constraints. A deep neural network is developed using parallel threads that efficiently explore the immense routerless NoC design space with a Monte Carlo search tree. Experimental results show that, compared with conventional mesh, the proposed deep reinforcement learning (DRL) routerless design achieves a 3.25x increase in throughput, 1.6x reduction in packet latency, and 5x reduction in power. Compared with the state-of-the-art routerless NoC, DRL achieves a 1.47x increase in throughput, 1.18x reduction in packet latency, 1.14x reduction in average hop count, and 6.3% lower power consumption. 
    more » « less