The growing prospect of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) being used in cyber-physical systems has raised concerns around safety and robustness of autonomous agents. Recent work on generating adversarial attacks have shown that it is computationally feasible for a bad actor to fool a DRL policy into behaving sub optimally. Although certain adversarial attacks with specific attack models have been addressed, most studies are only interested in off-line optimization in the data space (e.g., example fitting, distillation). This paper introduces a Meta-Learned Advantage Hierarchy (MLAH) framework that is attack model-agnostic and more suited to reinforcement learning, via handling the attacks in the decision space (as opposed to data space) and directly mitigating learned bias introduced by the adversary. In MLAH, we learn separate sub-policies (nominal and adversarial) in an online manner, as guided by a supervisory master agent that detects the presence of the adversary by leveraging the advantage function for the sub-policies. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm enables policy learning with significantly lower bias as compared to the state-of-the-art policy learning approaches even in the presence of heavy state information attacks.

The vulnerability of deep image classification networks to adversarial attack is now well known, but less well understood. Via a novel experimental analysis, we illustrate some facts about deep convolutional networks for image classification that shed new light on their behaviour and how it connects to the problem of adversaries. In short, the celebrated performance of these networks and their vulnerability to adversarial attack are simply two sides of the same coin: the input image-space directions along which the networks are most vulnerable to attack are the same directions which they use to achieve their classification performance in the first place. We develop this result in two main steps. The first uncovers the fact that classes tend to be associated with specific image-space directions. This is shown by an examination of the class-score outputs of nets as functions of 1D movements along these directions. This provides a novel perspective on the existence of universal adversarial perturbations. The second is a clear demonstration of the tight coupling between classification performance and vulnerability to adversarial attack within the spaces spanned by these directions.

Recentstudieshaveshownthat the transferability of adversarial examples exists for CNNs, and the same holds true for ViTs.

We study adversarially robust transfer learning, wherein, given labeled data on multiple (source) tasks, the goal is to train a model with small robust error on a previously unseen (target) task. In particular, we consider a multi-task representation learning (MTRL) setting, i.e., we assume that the source and target tasks admit a simple (linear) predictor on top of a shared representation (e.g., the final hidden layer of a deep neural network). In this general setting, we provide rates on the excess adversarial (transfer) risk for Lipschitz losses and smooth nonnegative losses. These rates show that learning a representation using adversarial training on diverse tasks helps protect against inference-time attacks in data-scarce environments. Additionally, we provide novel rates for the single-task setting.