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Collaborating Authors

 Lei, Haozhe


ADAPT: A Game-Theoretic and Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Automated Distributed Adaptive Penetration Testing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The integration of AI into modern critical infrastructure systems, such as healthcare, has introduced new vulnerabilities that can significantly impact workflow, efficiency, and safety. Additionally, the increased connectivity has made traditional human-driven penetration testing insufficient for assessing risks and developing remediation strategies. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a distributed, adaptive, and efficient automated penetration testing framework that not only identifies vulnerabilities but also provides countermeasures to enhance security posture. This work presents ADAPT, a game-theoretic and neuro-symbolic framework for automated distributed adaptive penetration testing, specifically designed to address the unique cybersecurity challenges of AI-enabled healthcare infrastructure networks. We use a healthcare system case study to illustrate the methodologies within ADAPT. The proposed solution enables a learning-based risk assessment. Numerical experiments are used to demonstrate effective countermeasures against various tactical techniques employed by adversarial AI.


Zero-Shot Wireless Indoor Navigation through Physics-Informed Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The growing focus on indoor robot navigation utilizing wireless signals has stemmed from the capability of these signals to capture high-resolution angular and temporal measurements. Prior heuristic-based methods, based on radio frequency propagation, are intuitive and generalizable across simple scenarios, yet fail to navigate in complex environments. On the other hand, end-to-end (e2e) deep reinforcement learning (RL), powered by advanced computing machinery, can explore the entire state space, delivering surprising performance when facing complex wireless environments. However, the price to pay is the astronomical amount of training samples, and the resulting policy, without fine-tuning (zero-shot), is unable to navigate efficiently in new scenarios unseen in the training phase. To equip the navigation agent with sample-efficient learning and {zero-shot} generalization, this work proposes a novel physics-informed RL (PIRL) where a distance-to-target-based cost (standard in e2e) is augmented with physics-informed reward shaping. The key intuition is that wireless environments vary, but physics laws persist. After learning to utilize the physics information, the agent can transfer this knowledge across different tasks and navigate in an unknown environment without fine-tuning. The proposed PIRL is evaluated using a wireless digital twin (WDT) built upon simulations of a large class of indoor environments from the AI Habitat dataset augmented with electromagnetic (EM) radiation simulation for wireless signals. It is shown that the PIRL significantly outperforms both e2e RL and heuristic-based solutions in terms of generalization and performance. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Panshark/PIRL-WIN}.


Neurosymbolic Meta-Reinforcement Lookahead Learning Achieves Safe Self-Driving in Non-Stationary Environments

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In the area of learning-driven artificial intelligence advancement, the integration of machine learning (ML) into self-driving (SD) technology stands as an impressive engineering feat. Yet, in real-world applications outside the confines of controlled laboratory scenarios, the deployment of self-driving technology assumes a life-critical role, necessitating heightened attention from researchers towards both safety and efficiency. To illustrate, when a self-driving model encounters an unfamiliar environment in real-time execution, the focus must not solely revolve around enhancing its anticipated performance; equal consideration must be given to ensuring its execution or real-time adaptation maintains a requisite level of safety. This study introduces an algorithm for online meta-reinforcement learning, employing lookahead symbolic constraints based on \emph{Neurosymbolic Meta-Reinforcement Lookahead Learning} (NUMERLA). NUMERLA proposes a lookahead updating mechanism that harmonizes the efficiency of online adaptations with the overarching goal of ensuring long-term safety. Experimental results demonstrate NUMERLA confers the self-driving agent with the capacity for real-time adaptability, leading to safe and self-adaptive driving under non-stationary urban human-vehicle interaction scenarios.


Sampling Attacks on Meta Reinforcement Learning: A Minimax Formulation and Complexity Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Meta reinforcement learning (meta RL), as a combination of meta-learning ideas and reinforcement learning (RL), enables the agent to adapt to different tasks using a few samples. However, this sampling-based adaptation also makes meta RL vulnerable to adversarial attacks. By manipulating the reward feedback from sampling processes in meta RL, an attacker can mislead the agent into building wrong knowledge from training experience, which deteriorates the agent's performance when dealing with different tasks after adaptation. This paper provides a game-theoretical underpinning for understanding this type of security risk. In particular, we formally define the sampling attack model as a Stackelberg game between the attacker and the agent, which yields a minimax formulation. It leads to two online attack schemes: Intermittent Attack and Persistent Attack, which enable the attacker to learn an optimal sampling attack, defined by an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point, within $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ iterations. These attack schemes freeride the learning progress concurrently without extra interactions with the environment. By corroborating the convergence results with numerical experiments, we observe that a minor effort of the attacker can significantly deteriorate the learning performance, and the minimax approach can also help robustify the meta RL algorithms.


Self-Adaptive Driving in Nonstationary Environments through Conjectural Online Lookahead Adaptation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Powered by deep representation learning, reinforcement learning (RL) provides an end-to-end learning framework capable of solving self-driving (SD) tasks without manual designs. However, time-varying nonstationary environments cause proficient but specialized RL policies to fail at execution time. For example, an RL-based SD policy trained under sunny days does not generalize well to rainy weather. Even though meta learning enables the RL agent to adapt to new tasks/environments, its offline operation fails to equip the agent with online adaptation ability when facing nonstationary environments. This work proposes an online meta reinforcement learning algorithm based on the \emph{conjectural online lookahead adaptation} (COLA). COLA determines the online adaptation at every step by maximizing the agent's conjecture of the future performance in a lookahead horizon. Experimental results demonstrate that under dynamically changing weather and lighting conditions, the COLA-based self-adaptive driving outperforms the baseline policies in terms of online adaptability. A demo video, source code, and appendixes are available at {\tt https://github.com/Panshark/COLA}


Cognitive Level-$k$ Meta-Learning for Safe and Pedestrian-Aware Autonomous Driving

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The potential market for modern self-driving cars is enormous, as they are developing remarkably rapidly. At the same time, however, accidents of pedestrian fatalities caused by autonomous driving have been recorded in the case of street crossing. To ensure traffic safety in self-driving environments and respond to vehicle-human interaction challenges such as jaywalking, we propose Level-$k$ Meta Reinforcement Learning (LK-MRL) algorithm. It takes into account the cognitive hierarchy of pedestrian responses and enables self-driving vehicles to adapt to various human behaviors. %which takes into account pedestrian responses while learning the optimal strategies. As a self-driving vehicle algorithm, the LK-MRL combines level-$k$ thinking into MAML to prepare for heterogeneous pedestrians and improve intersection safety based on the combination of meta-reinforcement learning and human cognitive hierarchy framework. We evaluate the algorithm in two cognitive confrontation hierarchy scenarios in an urban traffic simulator and illustrate its role in ensuring road safety by demonstrating its capability of conjectural and higher-level reasoning.