arXiv AI

Taming the Adversary: A Cost-to-Disturbance Ratio Approach to Adversarial Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces CoDRA, a cost-to-disturbance ratio approach for adversarial reinforcement learning that balances controller performance and disturbance exposure without extra penalty terms. CoDRA uses a self‑normalized actor–critic update, scaling value terms by a stop‑gradient normalization constant derived from the current batch. Experiments on MuJoCo pendulum tasks show that CoDRA achieves the lowest cost across a range of forces and masses, outperforming other methods especially on the more challenging InvertedDoublePendulum environment.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

A Unified and Constrained View of Regularization-Based Robust Reinforcement Learning

The paper presents a unified framework for regularization-based robust reinforcement learning by deriving upper bounds on the performance gap between nominal and worst-case policies. These bounds are expressed as a regularization objective plus a KL-divergence penalty, explaining why KL penalties enhance robustness. The authors reformulate robust training as a constrained optimization problem, updating the Lagrange multiplier jointly with the policy to automatically tune regularization, and validate the approach with extensive adversarial evaluations on continuous control tasks.

By Amine Andam, Jamal Bentahar, Mustapha Hedabou
arXiv AI
Sep 1

BCPPO: Bachelier-Inspired Constrained Proximal Policy Optimization for Tail-Risk-Aware Safe Reinforcement Learning

BCPPO is a new variant of Proximal Policy Optimization that uses Bachelier-inspired cost‑prediction networks to generate a smooth penalty based on disagreement among critics. The method keeps temporal‑difference learning unchanged, applies a saturation‑aware controller to manage cost penalties, and deploys only the policy network. Across extensive experiments, BCPPO outperforms comparators in achieving higher mean returns while maintaining lower or comparable CVaR in all tested tasks.

By Dongsheng Hou, Yanqiao Chen, Yuhan Rui
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Robust Policy Optimization via Adversarial Importance Sampling

The paper introduces Adversarial Importance Sampling (Advis), a technique that leverages importance sampling over standard training trajectories to estimate and optimize worst‑case returns without extra environment interactions or auxiliary networks, thereby capturing long‑term robustness. It also presents advrl, a modular PyTorch library that consolidates existing robustness methods and adversarial attacks into single‑file implementations for easier prototyping and reproducible evaluation. Finally, the authors highlight that optimal adversarial hyperparameters do not transfer across agents, prompting evaluation against a broader set of attackers (6–14× more configurations) and demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach on continuous control tasks.

By Amine Andam, Jamal Bentahar, Mustapha Hedabou
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

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%.

By Boyang Zhang, Qingxin Xiao, Lingwei Dang, Qingyao Wu