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.
arXiv:2408. 09112v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning policies parametrized by deep neural networks have achieved strong performance for continuous control, yet even small input perturbations may lead to unpredictable behavior.
By Manuel Wendl, Lukas Koller, Tobias Ladner, Matthias Althoff
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:2606. 29867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved significant success in robotics and autonomous systems, yet remains vulnerable to adversarial perturbations that can severely degrade performance.
By Adithya Mohan, Daniel Kriegl, Torsten Sch\"on
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.
By Lucas Schott, Josephine Delas, Hatem Hajri, Elies Gherbi, Reda Yaich, Nora Boulahia-Cuppens, Frederic Cuppens, Sylvain Lamprier
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.
By Taeho Lee, Donghwan Lee