Opponent Aware Reinforcement Learning

Learning with opponent-learning awareness

PolicyGuard: Towards Test-time and Step-level Adversary Defense for Reinforcement Learning Agent

arXiv:2606. 12896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration.

Safe Learning Under Irreversible Dynamics via Asking for Help

The paper presents an algorithm that lets a learning agent ask for help from a mentor and transfer knowledge between similar states, enabling safe and effective learning in Markov decision processes with irreversible dynamics and infinite state spaces. It proves that both regret and the number of mentor queries grow sublinearly over time, using a sequence of three reductions to achieve a general result. The work claims to be the first formal proof that an agent can achieve high reward while becoming self‑sufficient in an unknown, unbounded, high‑stakes environment without resets.

When Can You Poison Rewards? A Tight Characterization of Reward Poisoning in Linear MDPs

arXiv:2604. 10062v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning (RL), where an adversary manipulates rewards within constrained budgets to force the target RL agent to adopt a policy that aligns with the attacker's objectives.

CoER: Defending against Adaptive Indirect Prompt Injection via Adversarial Co-Evolution and Refinement

The paper introduces CoER, a framework that defends language‑model agents against adaptive indirect prompt injection (IPI) by employing attacker‑defender co‑evolution and refinement. CoER models IPI as a general‑sum Markov game, uses Co‑PPO to maintain historical opponent populations, and fine‑tunes defenders only on verified safe demonstrations. In experiments across seven domains, CoER cuts attack success from 38.5% to 0.2% while boosting task utility from 63.2% to 76.3%.

Post-Hoc Robustness for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

To improve the real-world applicability of reinforcement learning (RL), the field of adversarially robust RL studies how to train agents under adversarial environment perturbations. In this setting, a protagonist agent optimizes a policy under environmental perturbations from an adversary, resulting in a zero-sum Markov game.

Addressing Over-Refusal in LLMs with Competing Rewards

arXiv:2606. 31748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety training on language models often induces over-refusal: improved safety on harmful prompts at the cost of increased refusal on harmless ones.

Post-Hoc Robustness for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 03521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To improve the real-world applicability of reinforcement learning (RL), the field of adversarially robust RL studies how to train agents under adversarial environment perturbations.

Turning Safety into Competence: Minimally Exploitable Robot Policies via Safety-Filtered Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Safety to Competence (S2C), a two‑stage reinforcement learning framework that first learns a safety filter and then trains a competitive task policy while embedding the filter. By separating safety synthesis from task learning, S2C reduces training complexity and prevents the policy from being exploited by adversarial attacks. Experiments on simulated touchdown games show that S2C achieves higher win rates, better Elo ratings, and lower exploitability than eight safe‑RL baselines, and hardware tests confirm its competence against a human opponent.

Adaptive Probabilistic Shielding by Learning MDPs for Safe Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2608. 19836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probabilistic shielding is a technique for safe reinforcement learning (RL).

A Contextual-Bandit Oversight Game with Two-Sided Informational Asymmetry

arXiv:2607. 00155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study runtime human oversight of an AI agent when private information runs in both directions: the human privately knows her reward function, while the AI privately knows the quality of the action it proposes.

Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning Through Adversarial Attacks and Training : A Survey

arXiv:2403. 00420v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a subfield of machine learning for training autonomous agents that take sequential actions across complex environments.