Improve Robustness of Reinforcement Learning against Observation
  Perturbations via $l_\infty$ Lipschitz Policy Networks
Buqing Nie Jingtian Ji Yangqing Fu Yue Gao
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable advances in
sequential decision tasks. However, recent works have revealed that DRL agents
are susceptible to slight perturbations in observations. This vulnerability
raises concerns regarding the effectiveness and robustness of deploying such
agents in real-world applications. In this work, we propose a novel robust
reinforcement learning method called SortRL, which improves the robustness of
DRL policies against observation perturbations from the perspective of the
network architecture. We employ a novel architecture for the policy network
that incorporates global $l_\infty$ Lipschitz continuity and provide a
convenient method to enhance policy robustness based on the output margin.
Besides, a training framework is designed for SortRL, which solves given tasks
while maintaining robustness against $l_\infty$ bounded perturbations on the
observations. Several experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness
of our method, including classic control tasks and video games. The results
demonstrate that SortRL achieves state-of-the-art robustness performance
against different perturbation strength.