The paper introduces Robust Fed-Q, a federated Q‑learning algorithm designed for settings where multiple agents interact with a shared Markov Decision Process and communicate through a central server. It combines model‑based and model‑free reinforcement learning techniques with a median‑of‑means strategy from robust statistics to handle a small fraction of adversarial agents. The authors prove that Robust Fed-Q achieves exact convergence to the optimal value function with high probability, attains near‑optimal finite‑time rates that benefit from collaboration, and requires only “~O(1)” communication rounds per guarantee.
By Sreejeet Maity, Aritra Mitra
arXiv:2607. 20822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by reinforcement learning in harsh environments, we consider the problem of learning an optimal policy subject to adversarially corrupted feedback.
By Sreejeet Maity, Aritra Mitra
The paper introduces Fed‑LSVI, a federated online reinforcement learning algorithm that uses linear function approximation in episodic Markov decision processes. It achieves a regret bound of ≥O(√{Md^3H^4T}) while only exchanging compressed sufficient statistics, thereby meeting privacy constraints. The method reduces communication cost to logarithmic in the number of episodes, a marked improvement over previous approaches that required linear communication.
By Zihang Liang, Haochen Zhang, Lingzhou Xue
The paper introduces the Viability‑constrained Behavioral Steering Attack (V‑BSA), a new attack strategy for federated reinforcement learning that targets the timing of interventions rather than just the construction of malicious updates. By selecting sparse intervention states based on local policy uncertainty and applying envelope‑constrained steering, V‑BSA can significantly degrade performance on discrete‑action benchmarks while using far fewer interventions than traditional dense poisoning attacks. The study demonstrates that the specific states at which interventions occur constitute a distinct and critical dimension of robustness in sequential decision‑making settings.
By Shutong Zheng, Sijia Chen
arXiv:2607. 21876v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate a decentralized reinforcement learning problem involving multiple agents that interact with the same Markov Decision Process (MDP).
By Sreejeet Maity, Feng Zhu, Aritra Mitra, Robert W. Heath Jr
arXiv:2605. 28276v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning algorithms are commonly analyzed (and designed) under the Markov assumption.
By Onno Eberhard, Claire Vernade, Michael Muehlebach
arXiv:2506. 07040v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study model-free methods for distributionally robust infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs).
By Yang Xu, Swetha Ganesh, Vaneet Aggarwal
arXiv:2609.36660v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study federated learning (FL) with adversarial clients, where the goal is to minimize the average loss of the honest (non-adversarial) clients witho...
By Leonardo F. Toso, James Anderson, Rafael Pinot, Nirupam Gupta
arXiv:2608. 03069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) learn value functions through bootstrapped temporal-difference updates, where future returns are approximated using a greedy maximization over next-state action values.
By Lipeng Zu, Xiaonan Zhang
arXiv:2607. 10630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robust motion planning in dense traffic requires autonomous vehicles to interact in rare and safety-critical scenarios that are underrepresented in naturalistic driving data.
By Tong Nie, Yuewen Mei, Junlin He, Yihong Tang, Jian Sun, Wei Ma
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.
By Siemen Herremans, Ali Anwar, Siegfried Mercelis
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