Reward Poisoning Attack Against Offline Reinforcement Learning
Yinglun Xu Rohan Gumaste Gagandeep Singh
We study the problem of reward poisoning attacks against general offline
reinforcement learning with deep neural networks for function approximation. We
consider a black-box threat model where the attacker is completely oblivious to
the learning algorithm and its budget is limited by constraining both the
amount of corruption at each data point, and the total perturbation. We propose
an attack strategy called `policy contrast attack'. The high-level idea is to
make some low-performing policies appear as high-performing while making
high-performing policies appear as low-performing. To the best of our
knowledge, we propose the first black-box reward poisoning attack in the
general offline RL setting. We provide theoretical insights on the attack
design and empirically show that our attack is efficient against current
state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms in different kinds of learning datasets.