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Title: Toward Evaluating Robustness of Deep Reinforcement Learning with Continuous Control

Paper content:
Deep reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many previously difficult reinforcement learning tasks, yet recent studies show that deep RL agents are also unavoidably susceptible to adversarial perturbations, similar to deep neural networks in classification tasks.
Prior works mostly focus on model-free adversarial attacks and agents with discrete actions.
In this work, we study the problem of continuous control agents in deep RL with adversarial attacks and propose the first two-step algorithm based on learned model dynamics.
Extensive experiments on various MuJoCo domains (Cartpole, Fish, Walker, Humanoid) demonstrate that our proposed framework is much more effective and efficient than model-free based attacks baselines in degrading agent performance as well as driving agents to unsafe states.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized the fields of AI and machine learning over the last decade.
The introduction of deep learning has achieved unprecedented success in solving many problems that were intractable in the field of RL, such as playing Atari games from pixels and performing robotic control tasks (Mnih et al., 2015; Lillicrap et al., 2015; Tassa et al., 2018) .
Unfortunately, similar to the case of deep neural network classifiers with adversarial examples, recent studies show that deep RL agents are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks.
A commonly-used threat model allows the adversary to manipulate the agent's observations at every time step, where the goal of the adversary is to decrease the agent's total accumulated reward.
As a pioneering work in this field, (Huang et al., 2017) show that by leveraging the FGSM attack on each time frame, an agent's average reward can be significantly decreased with small input adversarial perturbations in five Atari games.
(Lin et al., 2017) further improve the efficiency of the attack in (Huang et al., 2017) by leveraging heuristics of detecting a good time to attack and luring agents to bad states with sample-based Monte-Carlo planning on a trained generative video prediction model.
Since the agents have discrete actions in Atari games (Huang et al., 2017; Lin et al., 2017) , the problem of attacking Atari agents often reduces to the problem of finding adversarial examples on image classifiers, also pointed out in (Huang et al., 2017) , where the adversaries intend to craft the input perturbations that would drive agent's new action to deviate from its nominal action.
However, for agents with continuous actions, the above strategies can not be directly applied.
Recently, (Uesato et al., 2018) studied the problem of adversarial testing for continuous control domains in a similar but slightly different setting.
Their goal was to efficiently and effectively find catastrophic failure given a trained agent and to predict its failure probability.
The key to success in (Uesato et al., 2018) is the availability of agent training history.
However, such information may not always be accessible to the users, analysts, and adversaries.
Therefore, in this paper we study the robustness of deep RL agents in a more challenging setting where the agent has continuous actions and its training history is not available.
We consider the threat models where the adversary is allowed to manipulate an agent's observations or actions with small perturbations, and we propose a two-step algorithmic framework to find efficient adversarial attacks based on learned dynamics models.
Experimental results show that our proposed modelbased attack can successfully degrade agent performance and is also more effective and efficient than model-free attacks baselines.
The contributions of this paper are the following: Figure 1: Two commonly-used threat models.
• To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first model-based attack on deep RL agents with continuous actions.
Our proposed attack algorithm is a general two-step algorithm and can be directly applied to the two commonly-used threat models (observation manipulation and action manipulation).
• We study the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed model-based attack with modelfree attack baselines based on random searches and heuristics (rand-U, rand-B, flip, see Section 4).
We show that our model-based attack can degrade agent performance more significantly and efficiently than model-free attacks, which remain ineffective in numerous MuJoCo domains ranging from Cartpole, Fish, Walker, and Humanoid.
Evaluating on the total reward.
Often times, the reward function is a complicated function and its exact definition is often unavailable.
Learning the reward function is also an active research field, which is not in the coverage of this paper.
Nevertheless, as long as we have some knowledge of unsafe states (which is often the case in practice), then we can define unsafe states that are related to low reward and thus performing attacks based on unsafe states (i.e. minimizing the total loss of distance to unsafe states) would naturally translate to decreasing the total reward of agent.
As demonstrated in Table 2 , the results have the same trend of the total loss result in Table 1 , where our proposed attack significantly outperforms all the other three baselines.
In particular, our method can lower the average total reward up to 4.96× compared to the baselines result, while the baseline results are close to the perfect total reward of 1000.
Evaluating on the efficiency of attack.
We also study the efficiency of the attack in terms of sample complexity, i.e. how many episodes do we need to perform an effective attack?
Here we adopt the convention in control suite (Tassa et al., 2018) where one episode corresponds to 1000 time steps (samples), and we learn the neural network dynamical model f with different number of episodes.
Figure 3 plots the total head height loss of the walker (task stand) for the three baselines and our method with dynamical model f trained with three different number of samples: {5e5, 1e6, 5e6}, or equivalently {500, 1000, 5000} episodes.
We note that the sweep of hyper parameters is the same for all the three models, and the only difference is the number of training samples.
The results show that for the baselines rand-U and flip, the total losses are roughly at the order of 1400-1500, while (21) 809 (85) 959 (5) 193 (114) walk 934 (22) 913 (21) 966 (6) 608 ( a stronger baseline rand-B still has total losses of 900-1200.
However, if we solve Equation 3 with f trained by 5e5 or 1e6 samples, the total losses can be decreased to the order of 400-700 and are already winning over the three baselines by a significant margin.
Same as our expectation, if we use more samples (e.g. 5e6, which is 5-10 times more), to learn a more accurate dynamics model, then it is beneficial to our attack method -the total losses can be further decreased by more than 2× and are at the order of 50-250 over 10 different runs.
Here we also give a comparison between our model-based attack to existing works (Uesato et al., 2018; Gleave et al., 2019) on the sample complexity.
In (Uesato et al., 2018) , 3e5 episodes of training data is used to learn the adversarial value function, which is roughly 1000× more data than even our strongest adversary (with 5e3 episodes).
Similarly, (Gleave et al., 2019) use roughly 2e4 episodes to train an adversary via deep RL, which is roughly 4× more data than ours 2 .
In this paper, we study the problem of adversarial attacks in deep RL with continuous control for two commonly-used threat models (observation manipulation and action manipulation).
Based on the threat models, we proposed the first model-based attack algorithm and showed that our formulation can be easily solved by off-the-shelf gradient-based solvers.
Through extensive experiments on 4 MuJoCo domains (Cartpole, Fish, Walker, Humanoid), we show that our proposed algorithm outperforms all the model-free based attack baselines by a large margin.
There are several interesting future directions can be investigated based on this work and is detailed in Appendix.

assistant: text: We study the problem of continuous control agents in deep RL with adversarial attacks and proposed a two-step algorithm based on learned model dynamics.